Robert Mueller is seeking more information about Nigel Farage for his investigation into Russian interference in US politics, according to a target of the inquiry who expects to be criminally charged.
Jerome Corsi, a conservative author, said prosecutors working for Mueller questioned him about Farage, the key campaigner behind Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, two weeks ago in Washington.
Corsi said investigators for the special counsel also pressed him for information on Ted Malloch, a London-based American academic with ties to Farage, who informally advised Donald Trump and was interviewed by FBI agents earlier this year.
“They asked about both Nigel and Ted Malloch, I can affirm that they did,” Corsi told the Guardian on Tuesday. “But I’m really not going into detail because I respect the special counsel and the legal process.”
Mueller’s interest in Farage comes amid questions in the UK about whether Russia attempted to influence the June 2016 vote to leave the European Union, and Brexit’s most vocal political supporters.
A spokesman for Farage said of Corsi’s allegations: “This is ill-informed, intentionally malicious gossip and wholly untrue.”
Andy Wigmore, a spokesman for the pro-Brexit Leave campaign, said Farage had not been contacted by Mueller’s team.
Malloch’s publisher, Nick Magliato, said Malloch’s lawyer instructed the academic, who is in London, not to comment.
Corsi and several other conservative operatives in the US have been under investigation by Mueller for months in relation to the theft of Democratic party emails in 2016 by Russian hackers, which disrupted Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Farage has consistently denied any involvement with Russia and has mocked reports that he was facing legal scrutiny. Farage forged close ties with the Trump campaign and White House through his close friendship and association with Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart editor and White House strategist. The Guardian first reported in June last year that Farage was a “person of interest” in the Russia investigation.
Asked if the questions on Farage related to Trump’s 2016 election campaign or that year’s referendum on the UK leaving the EU, Corsi said on Tuesday: “Predominantly US politics, but of course Brexit was in the background.”
The questioning of Corsi was not the first time that US prosecutors showed an interest in people closely associated with the Brexit campaign. Last March, Malloch said he had been stopped by Mueller’s investigators when he arrived in the US from the UK. News of the FBI’s action was first announced by Corsi.
In a statement at the time, Malloch told the Guardian he had been issued a subpoena and interrogated by the FBI at Boston’s Logan airport. He was questioned, he said, about his involvement in the Trump campaign and his relationship with the Republican strategist Roger Stone, and asked if he had ever visited Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks chief, at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
The New York Times and Washington Post have reported that Mueller has taken an interest in the biggest funder of the pro-Brexit campaign, Arron Banks. The New York Times has reported that Mueller has obtained records of Banks’s communications with Russian diplomats.
Corsi said on Tuesday Banks’s name did not come up during his questioning.
Corsi, 72, is a former writer for the conspiracy website Infowars and was a leading proponent of the discredited theory that former president Barack Obama was not born in the US. He is a longtime associate of Stone, the Trump friend and “dirty trickster” who has advised Republican politicians since Richard Nixon.
On Monday, Corsi announced that he expected to be charged soon with lying to Mueller’s investigators, even though he believed he had been honest and candid during 40 hours of questions across six sessions. He said his brain had been turned to “mush” by the questioning and he may have inadvertently misspoken.
He said on Tuesday that after the last questioning session two weeks ago, one of Mueller’s officials told Corsi’s lawyer: “Prepare for plea discussions.” Such a remark would indicate that prosecutors believed they have grounds to charge Corsi with a crime. A spokesman for Mueller declined to comment.
Corsi said Mueller’s questioning focused on the theft of emails from Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, which were published by WikiLeaks. US intelligence agencies concluded the emails were stolen in a Russian intelligence operation.
He said: “The issue they went to over and over and over again was: who was my source with Assange?”
He conceded on Tuesday that he had sent emails to associates boasting of inside information from WikiLeaks about the plan to publish the emails, but insisted that he was merely trying to boost his reputation and in fact only knew information that was already public. He said he had never met nor spoken to Assange.
Corsi declined to say which associates he emailed about the email hacking. He said Mueller’s investigators had reviewed his Apple computer and his electronic devices, and during questioning had wielded a binder packed with records of his telephone calls and electronic communications. But, he said, they declined to share the records with him.