Note: This essay was first published on November 22, 2016. Shortly after, the essay was hacked. When the diarist clicked on the link to view the story, a large image of FBI Director James Comey would appear on the screen instead. The diarist recognized the photograph to be one that accompanied a news story about Director Comey testifying before Congress. The diarist then began to receive a security alert message when linking to the story. The alert stated that the identity of the website lawnewz.com could not be verified. (Lawnewz.com is ABC News legal analyst Dan Abrams’ website.) “You might be connected to a website that is pretending to be “lawnewz.com,” the alert said, “which could put your confidential information at risk.” So I am republishing it in this new forum to ensure readership security.
The diarist does not believe that this essay—the only one of four essays exploring possible Donald Trump ties to Russia published by the diarist in the month following the November 2016 national election to be hacked—was tinkered with by either the FBI (too obvious) or by Dan Abrams’ lawnewz.com. The question then becomes, who else would have a motive to hack into this essay and post a threatening image?
Having some experience in being harassed for my political actions and views, the diarist suspects that the argument being made in this particular essay is hitting too close to comfort for some.
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The American Corporate News Media remains silent with their non-follow-up to
- two highly placed Russians stating that the Kremlin was in contact with a “whole array” of Donald Trump election campaign officials, and WikiLeaks, during the United States presidential election
- a statement made one week after the election by the US National Security Agency Director that there “was a conscious effort by a nation-state to achieve a specific effect” during the 2016 presidential campaign
- a post-election comment posted on Facebook by the DNC staffer who led a team investigating Trump-Russia ties, a post which revealed that on Election Day, both the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice worked with an Anonymous-associated group of computer experts throughout the day to try to ward off Russian hacks of up to more than half of our states’ computerized vote-counting systems
- a news story which revealed that in June, the FBI had received a report on Donald Trump’s Russian ties from a former Western intelligence officer stating that the Kremlin had spent five years trying to cultivate Donald Trump to serve as a Russian asset to help Vladimir Putin disrupt NATO and other western alliances. The report also states that the Russian government may have successfully blackmailed Trump into becoming an asset.
There are more stories that can be added to this list, but the implication is already painfully clear: The American Corporate News Media is currently “normalizing” itself to be authoritarian-compliant, made complicit by their silence in a transition to a possibly treasonous-acting president-elect, and to his possible handler, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The media is now feeding us a steady stream of Trump-transition stories, which would be expected if we were in a normal post-election news cycle. But that is not the case in this specific instance: we are in the midst of a constitutional crisis, thanks to Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the 61 million-plus Americans—real and perhaps computer-generated—who voted for Donald Trump on November 8. Which is why it is ludicrous for the American Corporate News Media to instead obsess about such distractions as whether or not the cast of the Broadway hit “Hamilton” dissed Vice President-elect Mike Pence by their asking him politely from the stage if Donald Trump would respect the civil liberties of every American citizen and the humanity to be found in all human life.
Trump’s “Hamilton”-directed Twitter tantrum displaced his settling the estimated $175M fraud case that had been brought against him by former Trump University students from the front page of the Washington Post’s website within twenty-four hours. The president-elect settled the case for $25 million. As is usually the case when Donald Trump settles cases that have been brought against him, he did not admit guilt. But a non-admission of guilt does not equal innocence.
The Washington Post is far from alone in their self-appointed fetching of Donald Trump’s Twitter diarrhea: Any given mainstream media online news site is void of any “Trump may be a Russian asset” or “the presidential and US Senate votes may have been rigged” stories. This from a “free” press, a press apparently free from everything but its “Donald Trump is good for business” corporate masters.
The discovery of a Trump Organization computer server located in Manhattan’s Trump Tower found communicating with Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest private commercial bank, is but one of many alarming reports that are being ignored by major US media outlets. The story was broken by Slate contributing editor Franklin Foer on Halloween 2016. Alfa Bank is a member of the Alfa Group Consortium, Russia’s largest financial and industrial investment group. Ukrainians Mikhail Fridman and German Khan, and Russian-born Alexey Kuzmichev and Pyotr Aven, are the four largest of seven beneficial shareholders of Alfa Bank.
American press accounts downplay the bank’s involvement with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government. Fortune magazine European news editor Geoffrey Smith describes Alfa Bank as being founded by “the most enduringly successful, western-oriented (if hard-edged) capitalists in Russia. None of its key members are on either the U.S. or European sanctions lists … .” To Smith, the fact that Alfa Bank Ukraine, the Moscow-based bank’s subsidiary, has continued to expand its market share in the country, despite Russia’s almost-two-year-long military intervention there, is evidence of the “distance between Alfa and the Kremlin.” An equally likely and diametric explanation is that Alfa Bank is thriving in the Ukraine precisely because of a quietly favored status given to it by Vladimir Putin.
A careful examination of the history of the relationship between the Russian president and Pyotr Aven helps map the connection between Vladimir Putin and Alfa Bank: Aven aided Putin in avoiding a potentially political career-ending scandal when both worked in the early 1990s for the federal city of St. Petersburg. As Karen Dawisha tells the story in her 2014 book Putin’s Kleptocracy, in 1992 the St. Petersburg City Administration (city council) recommended that the government suspend Putin’s right to carry out the duties of his office, and relieve him of his position as head of the Committee for Foreign Liaison. The council’s decisions came in the wake of multiple charges of criminal corruption that had been levied against Putin. Aven, St. Petersburg’s Minister of Foreign Economic Relations, was in a position to assist him. On two separate occasions, Aven reinstated Putin’s right to perform the duties of his office—to issue licenses and to grant contracts—while the case was being litigated within St. Petersburg’s government.
President Boris Yeltsin’s federal representative to the area was charged with resolving the political impasse. Yeltsin’s emissary subsequently complained to Putin about his office’s failure to comply with the investigator’s request to turn over pertinent documents. In the end, as told by Dawisha, neither Yeltsin nor Aven did anything about the St. Petersburg City Administration’s request to remove Putin from office. Dawisha also writes that Pyotr Aven was an early supporter of Putin once Putin moved to Moscow in 1996, and began “to secure a series of key positions” for him.
If Vladimir Putin had not been able to hold on to his St. Petersburg post during this first stage of his political career, he might never have become the strongman leader of Russia that he is today. And Alfa Bank might not now be enjoying the prominent position it has in Russian and Ukrainian finance if Pyotr Aven was not one of the company’s primary shareholders.
Slate Contributing editor Franklin Foer reported at the end of October that Trump Tower’s Alfa Bank server was inadvertently discovered by a group of computer scientists who had banded together to help protect the American political system’s computer networks from potentially disruptive malware. The formation of the group was spurred by reports that Russian hackers had infiltrated Democratic National Committee computer servers in the spring of 2016. The scientists surmised that if the Russian hackers could break into the DNC’s system, they could also break into other political systems, including the Clinton and Trump campaigns’ servers.
In late July, one of the scientists discovered what identified as malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain name contained the word “Trump.” The scientist enlisted five of his allies to study the irregular contacts, or “pingings,’ between a bank in Russia and the Trump Organization server in Trump Tower. In time, they realized the pinging wasn’t malware. It instead seemed to represent patterns of human conversation that had been occurring for a sustained period of time. In studying the communication between the Russian bank and the Trump Organization, the scientists had been initially confused by the “odd configuration” of the Trump Organization’s Russian-linked server.
“I’ve never seen a server set up like that,” Franklin Foer quotes Christopher Davis as saying. “It looked weird, and it didn’t pass the sniff test.” Davis is the founder and chief executive officer of HYAS InfoSec, Inc., a cybersecurity firm. In 2013, the Federal Bureau of Investigation gave Davis its Award for Excellence for outstanding cybercrime investigation.
The suspect server was ostensibly set up in 2009 to run Trump business consumer marketing campaigns, but the scientists quickly noted that the server, as Davis quipped, “handled a strangely small load of traffic, such a small load that it would be hard for a company to justify the expense and trouble it would take to maintain it. I get more mail in a day than the server handled.” The scientists calculated that eighty-seven percent of the traffic into the Trump server came from two Alfa Bank servers. The Trump Organization server also appeared clandestine in nature. “It’s pretty clear that it’s not an open mail server,” another computer scientist involved in the study told Foer. “These organizations are communicating in a way designed to block other people out.”
In October, the research team turned the Trump server traffic logs over to Paul Vixie to study. Foer declares that “In the world of DNS experts, there’s no higher authority” than Vixie. Now the chief executive officer of Farsight Security, Vixie is credited with writing some of the central strands of the DNS code that makes the internet work. After studying the logs, Vixie concluded, “The parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive. This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project.”
In September, the New York Times began to investigate the story. Reporter Eric Lichtblau met with an Alfa Bank representative in Washington, D.C. The representative denied that the bank had anything to do with Donald Trump. But shortly after that conversation, Foer writes, "the Trump domain name in question seemed to suddenly stop working. When the scientists looked up the host, the DNS server returned a fail message, evidence that it no longer functioned.”
The computer scientists arrived at one logical conclusion: “The Trump Organization shut down the server after Alfa was told that the Times might expose the connection.” A University of California at Berkeley computer scientist who was not a member of the core investigating group, but who has studied the Trump Organization server logs, told Foer that the Trump domain name was “very sloppily removed.” Another researcher said, “it looked like 'the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.'“
Again, according to Foer,
Four days later, on Sept. 27, the Trump Organization created
a new host name, trump1.contact-client.com, which enabled
communication to the very same server via a different route.
When a new host name is created, the first communication
with it is never random. To reach the server after the reset-
ting of the host name, the sender of the first inbound mail has
to first learn of the name somehow. It’s simply impossible to
randomly reach a renamed server. “That party had to have
some kind of outbound message through SMS, phone, or some
noninternet channel they used to communicate [the new con-
figuration],” Paul Vixie told me. The first attempt to look up
the revised host name came from Alfa Bank. “If this was a pub-
lic server, we would have seen other traces,” Vixie says. “The
only lookups came from this particular source.”
There is one other “tell” to this story. Foer followed up with Trump’s organization after the computer scientists saw the Trump-Alfa Bank server go dead with the Trump server connection. Campaign spokesperson Hope Hicks responded to Foer by email:
The email server, set up for marketing purposes and operated
by a third-party, has not been used since 2010. The current traf-
fic on the server from Alphabank’s [sic] IP address is regular
DNS server traffic—not email traffic. To be clear, The Trump
Organization is not sending or receiving any communications
from this email server. The Trump Organization has no com-
munication or relationship with this entity or any Russian
entity.
Computer scientists told Foer that the Trump camp’s concept of “regular DNS server traffic” is erroneous. Despite the Trump campaign’s denial, the logs show the server had been functioning through the time of the New York Times’ Alfa Bank inquiry in late September-early October 2016; also someone had created a new host name for the Trump Organization to communicate with the same Alfa Bank servers.
Hope Hicks did not respond to Foer when he submitted follow-up questions. Unlike her boss, who is prone to answering questions about lies that he has been caught in by lying again, Hope Hicks decided to just let the questions go unanswered—confident, surely, that the same American Corporate News Media that had been obsessed throughout the campaign with Hillary Clinton’s private email server would give Donald Trump a flyer on his own very special, secret Alfa Bank connection.
America’s news media was only too happy to confirm the presumed Hicks strategy. Vox published an article the day after Foer’s Trump-Alfa Bank piece appeared on Slate. In their piece, headlined, “That explosive story about Trump's secret server talking to Russia doesn't add up,” Vox posited first that the evidence of a Trump-Alfa Bank connection is entirely circumstantial.
(Well, uh, no, that is incorrect. See the discussion of The Intercept’s response to Foer’s story below.)
Vox’s critique of Foer’s story is also based on the New York Times story, “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia,” which was published on the same day as Foer’s. That Times piece, written by Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers, was clearly an attempt by the James Comey-wing of the FBI to blunt the withering condemnation that the bureau Director received in response to his October 28 letter to Congress, in which he advised that the FBI had reopened its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s Secretary of State-era emails. Comey wrote that the bureau had done so because emails related to the case were found on the computer of disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner.
Comey’s unprecedented action led Richard Painter, the chief ethics lawyer for the George W. Bush White House between 2005 and 2007, to file an ethics complaint about Comey’s late intervention in the election with the White House’s Office of Special Counsel, claiming that Comey had violated the Hatch Act. The Hatch Act bars employees of the federal government from engaging with political parties and playing an active role in political campaigns. Painter filed the same complaint with the Office of Government Ethics, an independent federal agency within the executive branch that is designed “to prevent and resolve conflicts of interest.”
The FBI’s lackluster effort in investigating Trump’s Russia ties was made clear first on Halloween, when Mother Jones’ David Corn published his article reporting that, in June 2016, a former Western intelligence officer had given a report on Trump’s Russian ties to the bureau. In addition to asserting that the Putin government had tried for five years to cultivate Donald Trump as an asset, the report also suggested that the Kremlin may well have succeeded in “turning” Donald Trump through blackmail. The former intelligence officer’s report “horrified” and “shocked” the FBI official or officials who received it, according to the Corn news story. In August 2016, the former intel agent gave the materials upon which his report was based to the FBI when asked by the bureau to do so. The agent heard nothing more about the matter until the New York Times article justifying the FBI’s inaction was published on October 31.
Mention must be made about The Intercept’s next-day response to Franklin Foer’s Trump/Alfa Bank Slate story. The Intercept’s response is helpful in that it lists the other news organizations aside from Slate—the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, and Vice—who examined the story and declined to pursue it. In the end, The Intercept’s reporters quote Paul Vixie on the matter: “It’s a perfect ‘he-said, she-said’ situation. (None) of us has direct evidence.” But The Intercept’s story, and Twitter tweets made by Intercept aces Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, show that the news website does not believe that such gray areas worthy of further exploration exist in the stories reported by Franklin Foer and David Corn.
From October 31 to November 2, Glenn Greenwald tweeted or retweeted at least 14 messages attacking the Foer and Corn Trump-Russia stories. One such message was a re-tweet of MSNBC host Chris Hayes’ October 31 implicit commentary on David Corn’s story: “Don’t Just Trust Anonymous Sources Even If They Confirm Your Priors.” On November 1, Greenwald tweeted a link to a Washington Post story with the message, “YET AGAIN: That secret Trump-Russia email server link is likely neither secret nor a Trump-Russia link,” the words following the colon being the title of the Post’s report. Intercept co-founder Cahill tweeted at least six messages ridiculing both the Corn and Foer reports during the same time period.
Between the Intercept story and Cahill and Greenwald’s tweets, the news site mocked Salon for being that one news organization among many that will always be found to run a suspect news story; a nickname given to one of the computer scientists who played a role in determining what the group had discovered; Mother Jones for being the news organization that published David Corn’s account; Corn for using an anonymous source, and basically anyone and everyone who would dare to suggest that disturbing evidence exists of an underhanded Russian connection to an equally underhanded presidential candidate and his underhandedly-managed campaign.
For this writer, who reveres the work that Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitros engaged in to get the Edward Snowden revelations of US government “Big Brotherism” out to a world audience, there is no pleasure in concluding that The Intercept protests too much. In their November 1 dispatch, “Here’s the problem with the story connecting Russia to Donald Trump’s email server,” the site’s writers proudly inform the reader that they have received actual emails containing the first of the two Trump domain names in question from not just the Trump Organization, but from Alfa Bank as well. (Note to Vox: The connection between the servers is real.) Both emails contain marketing ads for Trump Hotels. The Intercept writers acknowledge that the November 25, 2015, and February 4, 2016, mailings “are from outside the time period observed by the ‘Nerds,’” but their narrative then goes on to suggest that “this one data point” means that we now have one checkmark in the “this is just some dumb spam server” column, and zero in the “’this is a hotline to Putin’s bedroom’” column.”
That’s a big leap, from one data point to one checkmark to a ridiculing of the idea that Trump’s well-concealed Alfa Bank connection might be something other than an innocent commercial router.
Tell us, Intercept, did you request the rest of the emails that were sent to and fro the servers during the course of the life of the one in Trump Tower? Did you ask for the emails—all of them—that flowed between point a and point b during the time inside the time period observed by “the Nerds”?
And the emails that the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank did supply to you, did you receive more than two? And when they were given to you, however many the actual number—do you think that they were given to you in the spirit of transparency, or to mask an ulterior motive that neither party wants the outside world to know?
To paraphrase George Orwell, The Intercept’s hatchet job on Franklin Foer’s Trump-Alfa Bank story isn’t journalism—it’s p.r. for thugs.
And let’s be clear about what David Corn’s naysayers are suggesting: David Corn’s use of an anonymous source means that the source, and his story, cannot be trusted; that David Corn has been duped, or that David Corn just made the whole thing up.
David Corn has been around for a good long while now. He’s worked for The Nation and for Mother Jones magazines. He won the prestigious George Polk Award in 2013 for his 2012 reporting on Republican Party presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s “47 percent of Americans are victims … dependent on government” who “pay no income tax” fundraiser. Corn attacked Nation Books’ parent company because its book division published the translation of a French book that argued the 9/11 attacks were caused by a breakdown in talks between the Taliban government and the United States to run an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. Corn wrote an internal memo to Nation staffers that, “The problem with these contrived conspiracy theories is that they obscure the facts about genuine governmental malfeasance.” Corn has never been accused of making up anything—until he dared to publish a story suggesting that the Donald Trump presidency may be a Vladimir Putin Production.
David Corn has been ridiculed for using an anonymous source for his October 31 story, but the confidentiality of sources when reporting a story, when necessary, seems to be an elemental aspect of investigative journalism. Would The Intercept, or any other investigative journalist on the planet, disagree? In this case, foreign government’s may have suspected that Corn’s source had once been a spy but have not been certain. Corn’s source may have interacted with intelligence sources in other countries whose lives may be imperiled if the former spy’s identity is revealed. This argument against Corn’s use of an anonymous source is odd, at best, coming from Glenn Greenwald andThe Intercept: Did not Edward Snowden ask Greenwald himself, and The Guardian newspaper editors and reporters poring through the materials he presented to them in 2013, to review the documents and redact any information that might compromise the safety of individuals, including intelligence assets?
As to whether or not David Corn was duped by his source, did not Corn employ another standard investigative journalist technique of vetting his source with others in the industry before following through with the story? Of course he did. Greenwald, Scahill, and all of the other professional journalists who have been distancing themselves from the possibility that Donald Trump could be a Russian asset seem guilty instead of not comprehending that the sexual predator Trump, who obviously has little impulse control, would be an easy mark for the likes of one Vladimir Putin.
To return to what we really know, and what we can glean from the actions of the parties involved.
The news media assault on the Franklin Foer story does not answer nor dismiss the question of what was being communicated via the Trump Tower server between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank. Apparently, with the exception of Franklin Foer, nobody has bothered to ask the Trump Organization why it shut down the server, and why, if it was so innocuous, it was shut down after a futile attempt to mask its communication with another Trump domain name. It should not be the job of The Intercept or any other news organization to give Donald Trump a pass on anything, given the obviously accurate observation made by Senator Bernie Sanders and others that Donald Trump is a pathological liar. (Did I hear that, next year, Politifact is creating a new category, a Donald, for which each orange splat mark will represent 10 “Pants On Fire!”?)
Sad.
One last story as yet to be followed up on by the “free press” of the United States of America: Nearly 250 independent businesses in Russia with the Trump name on them have not been reported to the United States government. The failure of an American to register a foreign business with the United States government is a federal crime. This information was gleaned not by journalists, but by a Democratic Party coalition who worked during the election season on Trump’s Russia ties. The report was delivered on November 11 to the White House and to top Democratic congressional leaders. It is now November 22. Where is the follow-up reporting?
By treating this post-election period as a pro-forma exercise leading up to Inauguration Day on January 20, 2017, Big Media's focus on predictable photo ops and Twitter tweets obscures the spectacle of the president-elect establishing a white Nationalist government, treating foreign businesses and governments as new rubes to play, and on the other dark stories about Donald Trump and his apparatchiks that have surfaced. This American journalistic fail is enabling the most serious threat to democracy in America since Watergate, and an even greater instability for the wider world.
Postscript: President-elect Donald Trump met with New York Times management, editors, columnists and reporters on November 22 at Times headquarters. Times staffers did not ask Donald Trump any questions vbout his possible Russia ties, and the possible Russian rigging of the 2016 American national election in favor of Trump and Republican Party US Senate candidates.
Sources
http://alfabank.com/investor/ownership/http://www.forbes.com/profile/mikhail-fridman/
http://www.forbes.com/profile/german-khan/
http://www.forbes.com/profile/alexei-kuzmichev/
http://www.forbes.com/profile/pyotr-aven/
http://fortune.com/2016/11/02/donald-trump-alfa-bank/
Dawisha, Karen. Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who owns Russia? Pp. 118-119, 163-164, 196. 2014. New York: Simon & Schuster.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/10/was_a_server_registered_to_the_trump_organization_communicating_with_russia.html
http://www.hyas.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/davissecurity?authType=NAME_SEARCH&authToken=ZgwC&locale=en_US&trk=tyah&trkInfo=clickedVertical%3Amynetwork%2CclickedEntityId%3A5576332%2CauthType%3ANAME_SEARCH%2Cidx%3A1-1-1%2CtarId%3A1479739787165%2Ctas%3AChris%20Davis%20HYAShttps://www.linkedin.com/in/paulvixie?authType=NAME_SEARCH&authToken=yg1r&locale=en_US&trk=tyah&trkInfo=clickedVertical%3Amynetwork%2CclickedEntityId%3A71465981%2CauthType%3ANAME_SEARCH%2Cidx%3A1-1-1%2CtarId%3A1479740905162%2Ctas%3APaul%20Vixiehttps://www.oge.gov/web/oge.nsf/About+OGE/
https://osc.gov/Resources/HA%20Pamphlet%20Sept%202014.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/fbi-russia-election-donald-trump.html?
http://lawnewz.com/high-profile/former-bush-ethics-lawyer-files-complaint-accusing-fbi-director-of-violating-hatch-act/
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/01/heres-the-problem-with-the-story-connecting-russia-to-donald trumps-email-server/
http://articles.latimes.com/2002/jul/03/news/lv-media3
See exhibit 10. https://www.scribd.com/document/330757147/The-Dworkin-Report-by-The-Democratic-Coalition