In this week’s New Yorker, Dexter Filkins writes a long piece (“Enigma Machines”) on the continuing mystery of the web traffic between a Trump Organization computer server, Alfa Bank in Russia, and Spectrum Health, a health services provider in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I’ve written a few diaries about this here on DKOs.
If you haven’t been following this story, the simple summary is that the connection remains a mystery with no straightforward explanation—similar to what Mark Sumner reported here several months ago—and your time is likely better spent concentrating on the midterm elections!
For those who have dug deeper, there are a few new pieces of information. There’s more detail on when and how the original data set was obtained, who was working on it, and what work has been and is being performed by computer experts to test whether some of the simple, more innocuous explanations for the web traffic are plausible (in general they are not), or if the data were faked (again, highly unlikely). Additionally, the story identifies at least one other entity, a payments processor based in Princeton that also appeared in the web traffic less frequently.
Franklin Foer broke the original story in Slate on October 31, 2016, and tweeted about the New Yorker piece this morning:
But, as the New Yorker article concludes:
The enigma, for now, remains an enigma. The only people likely to finally resolve the question of Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization are federal investigators. Max told me that no one in his group had been contacted. But, he said, it wasn’t necessary for anyone in the F.B.I. to talk to him, if the agents gathered the right information from other sources, like Listrak and Cendyn. “I hope Mueller has all of it,” he said.
This may seem weak, but let me emphasize that the web traffic being analyzed is frustratingly abstract. If and when this story moves beyond the present enigmas, it will require hearing from the individuals behind the ‘pings’. Only the F.B.I. or Mueller’s investigation team is likely to have access to those people, if at all.