A few questions:
What was a Russian bank — Alpha Bank — sending to a Trump server during the 2016 election? Information? Back-channel voice communication? Some digital linkage in a scheme to transfer money? (that is what banks do, right? Handle money?)
Why was the Trump server also communicating with Spectrum Health? The Health Care Company owned by Dick DeVos — husband of Betty DeVos, our new Education Secretary? A family that has contributed over two hundred million dollars to the Republican Party over the years, but supposedly didn’t fund Trump during the election?
And why did the Trump organization shut down their server in late September, during the election, when the New York Times started asking questions about it?
A Bizarre story about a Trump server and a Russian bank.
This is a hard to understand, bizarre story and it’s not been well reported. You won’t find answers here, because no one has the answers yet. But you will find links to key stories you should read if you want to understand what can be known. And I pose some questions that need answers.
First, the Alpha Bank. Some claim the bank is a western-oriented Russian bank without close connections to Putin. But the secret dossier on Trump put together by the former MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele alleged the contrary — that there was a very close connection between Putin and the Alpha Bank (identified in the dossier as the “Alpha Group”). Other reporting backs up his allegation. Certainly it defies credulity and common sense that Alpha Bank could operate as freely as it does without Putin’s approval.
Reporting in Slate prior to the election, and by CNN last week says that the Alpha Bank was communicating with a Trump server — and that the Trump server in turn was communicating with Dick DeVos’ Spectrum Health. Why? And what was being sent between Alpha Bank and Trump’s server? We only know there was an active DNS internet link between Trump and Russia, but we don’t know what it means. The connection was noticed in the summer of 2016 by computer scientists worried about Russian tampering with the election after the DNC leak — so they checked to see if Russians were also trying to communicate with Trump computers in an attempt to break in. But instead they found evidence of something else entirely in computer logs that detailed the Alpha-Trump server links. This from Slate:
Earlier this month, the group of computer scientists passed the logs to Paul Vixie. In the world of DNS experts, there’s no higher authority. Vixie wrote central strands of the DNS code that makes the internet work. After studying the logs, he 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.” Put differently, the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence. Over the summer, the scientists observed the communications trail from a distance.
We do know thanks to reporting in the BBC and by McClatchy that US intelligence had enough evidence to get a FISA warrant on October 15th to investigate this Russian bank — Trump computer connection.
Could this be what Trump was actually talking about when he claimed Obama “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory”? After all there WAS a FISA warrant to investigate Trump’s links to the bank. According to the BBC:
Neither Mr Trump nor his associates are named in the Fisa order, which would only cover foreign citizens or foreign entities - in this case the Russian banks. But ultimately, the investigation is looking for transfers of money from Russia to the United States, each one, if proved, a felony offence.
A lawyer- outside the Department of Justice but familiar with the case - told me that three of Mr Trump's associates were the subject of the inquiry. "But it's clear this is about Trump," he said.
And the FBI is still investigating, according to CNN.
Why weren’t we told more about this investigation before the election?
Yet another question. Why did the New York Times kill this story just a week before the election by reporting that the FBI had found no link between Alpha Bank and the Trump campaign?
And why in the same story did they say the Russians were only trying to disrupt the election, but not trying to elect Trump?
Only a few weeks later the Washington Post reported the opposite, that Putin was trying hard to elect Trump. Who in the FBI was talking to the Times? Why were other news outlets getting very different stories from their FBI contacts?
Were the Times’ FBI sources leaking that story prior to the election to help Trump?
The $64,000 Question: was money going from Putin to Trump?
That was the reason a U.S. intelligence task force was able to get that FISA — according to the FBI — they had been given intelligence from one of the Baltic states indicating a money link between Russia and Trump. Again from the BBC:
Last April, the CIA director was shown intelligence that worried him. It was - allegedly - a tape recording of a conversation about money from the Kremlin going into the US presidential campaign.
The secret dossier by Steele, the former MI6 man, also alleged a money link, and furthermore said that Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen arranged a cover-up prior to the election. (I transcribed this from the dossier):
In Prague, Cohen agreed contingency plans for various scenarios to protect the operation, but in particular what was to be done in the event that Hillary CLINTON won the presidency. It was important in this even that all cash payments owed were made quickly and discretely and that cyber and other operators were stood down/able to go effectively to ground to cover their traces . . .
Cohen denies that he was in Prague and calls the dossier “fake news” and some are skeptical of dossier’s claims since they are based on intelligence sources that can’t be substantiated. But an ex-KGB chief who helped Steele prepare the dossier was murdered in Moscow in late January. Which likely means someone in Russia was taking the dossier seriously.
And the FBI believed in it enough that they wanted to pay Steele to continue the work, according to the Washington Post. But Trump won the election, the dossier was leaked and the deal was killed.
What to read if you want to catch up.
If you want to read the Steele dossier for yourself, here’s a link to the PDF, and here’s the Buzzfeed article explaining why they published it.
Here’s a link to the pre-election Slate article on the Trump server — Alpha bank connection.
Here’s something from The Intercept criticizing the Slate Reporting.
This is the Slate rebuttal of The Intercept criticism.
This is the recent CNN story that the FBI is still investigating the server.
This is a good easy-to-read story about the same investigation in Business Insider.
What to do now?
Start asking questions — start talking to others about it. And start demanding that the Congress gets answers to all the Trump-Russia questions.