A bombshell has dropped. Buried inside the 8,000 words of an outstanding article for The New Yorker were some critical facts that, beyond reasonable doubt, demonstrate a pattern of communication between members of the team working to get Donald Trump elected president of the United States of America. Some of those team members were based in the United States, and some of those team members were based in Russia.
The story of the copious data exchanges between servers in Trump Tower and servers in the headquarters of Alfa Bank in Russia is not a new one. But until now little has been understood about nature of this communication channel, beyond the fact that it existed. The New Yorker article sheds light on the matter in a way never previously done. Here follows a summary of that article.
One of the experts that the report relies on first approached the topic, based, in his words, on “an assumption that this is a bunch of nonsense.” Another described himself as a “John McCain Republican.” Regardless of their initial assumptions and political affiliations, the New Yorker article makes clear that they approached their separate and independent investigations methodically, scientifically, and rigorously.
In the course of these investigations it was found that the number of times that the data connections opened between these New York and Moscow servers was in the thousands.
“There were dozens of lookups on some days and far fewer on others, but the number was notable: between May and September (2016) Alfa Bank looked up the Trump Organization’s domain more than two thousand times.” The month that this communication started, May, was the month that Donald Trump was declared the presumptive Republican nominee by then RNC Chairman Reince Preibus.
A third server was also involved: It was located in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and belonged to a company called Spectrum Health. The Chairman of the Board of Spectrum Health is Richard De Vos Jr., the husband of Betsy De Vos, who now serves as the Education Secretary of the US. The brother of Betsy De Vos, brother in law to Richard De Vos, is an intriguing character called Erik Prince. On Jan. 11, 2017, just over a week before Donald Trump was inaugurated, Prince is known to have met a man called Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s US-sanctioned $10 billion Sovereign Wealth Fund, and so a man who obviously has close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Prince claims the meeting, which took place in the Seychelles, was “unplanned and uneventful” but people familiar with the matter, including one witness who is cooperating with the Mueller investigation, have claimed that in fact the meeting was planned in advance.
Back to the communication between Alfa Bank and Trump Tower… What is clear from the investigations reported by the New Yorker is that the nature of the exchanges appears to be human. One of the first reporters working on this story was Eric Lichtbau, a two-time Pullitzer Prize winner for his work with the New York Times, is extensively quoted in the New Yorker. He concluded that “not only is there clearly something there but there’s clearly something that someone has gone to great lengths to conceal.”
Another journalist who was pulling at the threads of this story, Frank Foer of Slate, reported that just two days after a Washington lobbying form who worked for Alfa Bank were made aware of reporting on this matter, the Trump domain that had been the link in this communication channel vanished.
Despite this, the Alfa Bank server continued to try to communicate via this channel for another four days, until suddenly they stopped. Then, on Sept. 27, ten minutes after the last lookup to the now defunct domain name, they began to communicate via a new Trump domain name. The New Yorker column, quoting one of the investigators, reads, “That shows human interaction… Certain actions leave fingerprints.”
The investigator reasoned that someone representing Alfa Bank had alerted the Trump organization, which shut down the domain, set up a new one, and then informed Alfa Bank of the new address.
It should be noted that Alfa Bank not only denies any involvement in this matter, but they even went to the lengths of hiring their own investigators to investigate themselves. Hardly an independent inquiry, obviously. While it may be the case that the events that were certainly taking place from inside the bank’s HQ were not coordinated by the management of the bank, it is known that all major companies in Russia have government actors, members of the intelligence services who would be called a “curator,” working inside them.
It appears that in the case of the curator inside Alfa Bank, he or she was fastidious about taking their days off. In the period of the switch from one domain to the other, investigators “observed fifteen failed attempts (to connect the servers via the now deleted Trump domain) that Friday, twenty eight on Saturday, none on Sunday, ninety on Monday, twenty on Tuesday.” It is clear that these communications were not automated or random, as no automatic or random process would suddenly “discover” out of the blue a new domain name through which to establish connections between the servers, and then automatically or randomly switch all communications to that routing.
What is not known – yet – is the content of all of this communication. While it is now established fact that this channel of communication between Trump and Moscow certainly existed, we can only speculate at the information or instructions that were being passed back and forth. This is something that no doubt Special Counsel Bob Mueller and his team are working to understand, but without doubt we have yet more publicly-available evidence of collusion now.
In his writing for Slate, Frank Foer claimed that the biggest flurries of traffic coincided with major events, including the parties conventions, and that the traffic coincided with Paul Manafort’s time as Trump’s Campaign Manager. The New Yorker then goes on to quote speculation from the expert investigators that one type of communication that could have taken place through this connection was something called “foldering”, which is a practice of people writing messages to each other in the drafts section of a shared Email account, to avoid detection and to avoid leaving a trace of (clearly illicit, or why hide it?) any details in any communication. Who else is well known for using the “foldering” tactic as a common form of communication? Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.
Among the many experts quoted in this spectacular reporting from the New Yorker is Jean Camp, of Indiana University. Her theory is probably closest to what Mueller will uncover, or has already uncovered, “that the system may have been used to coordinate the movement of data. She noted that Cambridge Analytica, which was working for the Trump Campaign, took millions of personal records from Facebook. In Camp’s scenario, these could have been transferred to the Russian government, to help guide its targeting of U.S. voters before the election.” What else would these individuals have been doing through this covert communications channel?
So for those people looking for a new definition of the term “devil’s triangle,” here’s a candidate: Trump-Moscow-DeVos.
