TRUMPISM IS PUTINISM (profanity alert):

According to an interview with the New Yorker, the independent researchers who uncovered the Alfa Bank/Trump link decided to hand over what they found to Eric Lichtblau, a reporter at the New York Times, in August 2020. A month later Sussmann brought data suggesting this connection to a friend who was working at the FBI. Sussmann claims it was provided to him by Rodney Joffe, a tech executive and data scientist who was his client at the time.

In the intervening month, Lichtblau had been sharing the data with other cybersecurity experts. He told the New Yorker in 2018 that those conversations led him to believe that "Not only is there clearly something there but there's clearly something that someone has gone to great lengths to conceal."

In late September 2016, Lichtblau had determined that he had enough information to write a story about the servers. On September 21, he reached out to Alfa Bank's lobbyists in D.C. about it. Two days later the Trump domain that had been the recipient of the Alfa Bank DNS lookups disappeared from the internet. Within a week the connection stopped.

What a coincidence!

As this reporting was underway, Lichtblau was called by an FBI official who asked him to come to the bureau's headquarters. During that meeting the FBI asked Lichtblau to delay his story about the servers, as it might interfere with their ongoing investigation into the potential relationship between the Russians who were interfering in our elections and domestic contacts possibly associated with Trump.

The Times decided to honor this request after what executive editor Dean Baquet described as "a really intense debate," since the paper had not determined the underlying reason for the server connection.

For the next month the Alfa Bank affair went dark. In the meantime the Clinton campaign was hit with a barrage of stories about the information in the emails that had been hacked by the Russians. Trump famously asked Russia to continue the hack, if they were listening and he would reference the leaked emails over 160 times on the campaign trail.

During this period the New York Times was not shy about covering the hacked materials. On October 10 the Times published "highlights" from the Clinton campaign emails. The word Russia does not appear in this article. The same day, the Times ran another article about the topic: "Hillary Clinton's Campaign Strained to Hone Her Message, Hacked Emails Show." The only time the word Russia appears in this article is in reference to a quote from Clinton's spokesman.

So throughout the final month before the 2016 election the paper of record sat on evidence of potential ties between Trump and Russia, doing nothing with it at the FBI's behest--yet it reported extensively on the emails resulting from the Russian operation and how they were harming the Clinton campaign.

Meanwhile, the same FBI that had pressured the Times to avoid making public any information relevant to their investigation of ties between Trump and Russia did not show that same circumspection when it came to Clinton. The Comey letter to Congress about reopening the investigation into Clinton's email server was published on October 28.

Sure doesn't seem like all the players in this pro-Hillary cOnSpiRaCy were on the same page.

Alfa Bank came back into the picture on October 30, 2016, after a frustrated Harry Reid penned an outraged letter to the FBI charging that the bureau was withholding information about the ties between Trump and Russia related to the email hacks.

The next day, on Halloween, Slate's Franklin Foer provided some of that evidence, reporting on the data initially presented to Lichtblau--which had been shared with him by the Clinton campaign, though he developed additional sources, including one of the original data scientists.

In June, 2016, after news broke that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked, a group of prominent computer scientists went on alert. Reports said that the infiltrators were probably Russian, which suggested to most members of the group that one of the country's intelligence agencies had been involved. They speculated that if the Russians were hacking the Democrats they must be hacking the Republicans, too. "We thought there was no way in the world the Russians would just attack the Democrats," one of the computer scientists, who asked to be identified only as Max, told me.

The group was small--a handful of scientists, scattered across the country--and politically diverse. (Max described himself as "a John McCain Republican.") Its members sometimes worked with law enforcement or for private clients, but mostly they acted as self-appointed guardians of the Internet, trying to thwart hackers and to keep the system clean of malware--software that hackers use to control a computer remotely, or to extract data. "People think the Internet runs on its own," Max told me. "It doesn't. We do this to keep the Internet safe." The hack of the D.N.C. seemed like a pernicious attack on the integrity of the Web, as well as on the American political system. The scientists decided to investigate whether any Republicans had been hacked, too. "We were trying to protect them," Max said.

Max's group began combing the Domain Name System, a worldwide network that acts as a sort of phone book for the Internet, translating easy-to-remember domain names into I.P. addresses, the strings of numbers that computers use to identify one another. Whenever someone goes online--to send an e-mail, to visit a Web site--her device contacts the Domain Name System to locate the computer that it is trying to connect with. Each query, known as a D.N.S. lookup, can be logged, leaving records in a constellation of servers that extends through private companies, public institutions, and universities. Max and his group are part of a community that has unusual access to these records, which are especially useful to cybersecurity experts who work to protect clients from attacks.

Max and the other computer scientists asked me to withhold their names, out of concern for their privacy and their security. I met with Max and his lawyer repeatedly, and interviewed other prominent computer experts. (Among them were Jean Camp, of Indiana University; Steven Bellovin, of Columbia University; Daniel Kahn Gillmor, of the A.C.L.U.; Richard Clayton, of the University of Cambridge; Matt Blaze, of the University of Pennsylvania; and Paul Vixie, of Farsight Security.) Several of them independently reviewed the records that Max's group had discovered and confirmed that they would be difficult to fake. A senior aide on Capitol Hill, who works in national security, said that Max's research is widely respected among experts in computer science and cybersecurity.

As Max and his colleagues searched D.N.S. logs for domains associated with Republican candidates, they were perplexed by what they encountered. "We went looking for fingerprints similar to what was on the D.N.C. computers, but we didn't find what we were looking for," Max told me. "We found something totally different--something unique." In the small town of Lititz, Pennsylvania, a domain linked to the Trump Organization (mail1.trump-email.com) seemed to be behaving in a peculiar way. The server that housed the domain belonged to a company called Listrak, which mostly helped deliver mass-marketing e-mails: blasts of messages advertising spa treatments, Las Vegas weekends, and other enticements. Some Trump Organization domains sent mass e-mail blasts, but the one that Max and his colleagues spotted appeared not to be sending anything. At the same time, though, a very small group of companies seemed to be trying to communicate with it.

Examining records for the Trump domain, Max's group discovered D.N.S. lookups from a pair of servers owned by Alfa Bank, one of the largest banks in Russia. Alfa Bank's computers were looking up the address of the Trump server nearly every day. There were dozens of lookups on some days and far fewer on others, but the total number was notable: between May and September, Alfa Bank looked up the Trump Organization's domain more than two thousand times. "We were watching this happen in real time--it was like watching an airplane fly by," Max said. "And we thought, Why the hell is a Russian bank communicating with a server that belongs to the Trump Organization, and at such a rate?"

Only one other entity seemed to be reaching out to the Trump Organization's domain with any frequency: Spectrum Health, of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Spectrum Health is closely linked to the DeVos family; Richard DeVos, Jr., is the chairman of the board, and one of its hospitals is named after his mother. His wife, Betsy DeVos, was appointed Secretary of Education by Donald Trump. Her brother, Erik Prince, is a Trump associate who has attracted the scrutiny of Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trump's ties to Russia. Mueller has been looking into Prince's meeting, following the election, with a Russian official in the Seychelles, at which he reportedly discussed setting up a back channel between Trump and the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. (Prince maintains that the meeting was "incidental.") In the summer of 2016, Max and the others weren't aware of any of this. "We didn't know who DeVos was," Max said.

The D.N.S. records raised vexing questions. Why was the Trump Organization's domain, set up to send mass-marketing e-mails, conducting such meagre activity? And why were computers at Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health trying to reach a server that didn't seem to be doing anything? After analyzing the data, Max said, "We decided this was a covert communication channel."

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