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The spark of Trump’s claim is a court filing on Friday. It combines several attractive threads from the Trump era to make a relatively indistinct accusation, one that is then distorted through some of Trump’s staunchest allies as a device. Discussions
You’ll recall that Trump’s main complaint as president was that the investigation into Russian interference and the conceivable overlap with his crusade was baseless. This was not the case, as it involved investigations into several Americans with apparent ties to Russian actors. But Trump and his allies have crafted a countervailing narrative focused on misconduct through government officials — once again, a claim following Trump’s initial reaction to reports about the investigation in which he claimed government officials might need to catch him.
Finally, Trump’s unwavering attorney general, William P. Barr, appointed U. S. Attorney John Durham as special counsel to investigate the Russia investigation. 2016 election in which he alleged that there was a secret communication between a Russian bank, Alfa Bank, and an email server of the Trump Organization.
When this allegation was first reported in October 2016, it was manifestly unfounded. I wrote about the other tactics, the concept did not pass the smell test, from a theoretical point of view: why leave a clue if you are looking to secretly talk to Russia?– to the method, given that the Trump Organization’s server is not controlled by Trump at all. Others, like technologist Rob Graham, came to a similar conclusion: that it’s probably just a side effect of marketing email failures.
Last year, Durham revealed an opposing allegation to a lawyer named Michael Sussman focused on the Alfa Bank rumor. Durham claimed Sussman lied to an FBI official in September 2016 while seeking the FBI to investigate the connection, saying he was not applying for an express consumer because he was providing the clue. The accusation is that he was a fake of the kind that tripped up various Trump allies during the Russia investigation: that Sussman was, in fact, running for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. As journalist Marcy Wheeler wrote, the thief’s case is not extraordinarily strong.
The Alpha Bank rumor theory is complicated. Sussman’s law firm, Perkins Coie, had been held up through Clinton’s crusade (leading him, separately, to rent the investigation corporation Fusion GPS, which later generated the notorious dossier of reports alleging a connection most powerful between Russia and the Trump team). An unidentified individual first detected the traffic between Trump’s server and the Russian bank and took it to an executive at a generation company who had hired Perkins Coie and worked with Sussman. (Wheeler has a correct timeline for all of this. ) This sparked an effort to read into the extent of those links, an effort that at least some of those involved in the studies reportedly understood as an effort to create a starting point for other studies that may simply bolster a Trump-Russia narrative. (I will note that the tech exec was not sold on the Alpha-Trump relationship even in August 2016. ) Durham’s filing links the crusade with Sussman and Sussman with the executive, but does not explicitly state that the investigation foundered from the start. Clinton’s team – or even him.
Remember that in July 2016, the focus was already on the imaginable ties between Trump and Russia. Last month, Russian actors were involved in the theft of material from the Democratic National Committee, which was published through WikiLeaks beyond July. Trump’s allies have in the afterlife tried to show that Clinton’s crusade focused on expanding this connection as the cause of the Russia investigation when, in reality, this concentration only occurred after the emergence of the political conversation. There is no indication that the Alfa Bank investigation preceded Clinton’s crusade. public discussion of the imaginable relations between Trump and Russia, and indeed there were reasons to pay attention to an imaginable virtual connection between the two.
Now the technical. The challenge here is what’s called domain call server (DNS) lookups. Internet traffic moves between known issues through Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, strings of numbers that can be thought of as latitude and longitude in actual positioning. In the real world, we don’t direct other people to latitude and longitude coordinates, or to postal addresses. On the Internet, we don’t move to IP addresses or domains. A DNS lookup converts a domain such as washingtonpost. com into the genuine IP address of the Internet server in that record.
Traffic between Alfa Bank and Trump’s mail server, run through a company called Cendyn that performs many marketing tasks in the hospitality industry, consisted of DNS lookups. Alfa Bank’s server sought to locate domain data for trump-email. com (the domain in question) and the searches were saved.
Here it is vital to know why those recordings may also have been collected. A tech expert I spoke to on Monday explained that ISPs allow third parties to collect domain call searches because the data is useful for tracking bad guys on the internet. If, for example, there are suddenly a number of searches on we11sfargo. com, and some replace the L’s in the domain call, this may also recommend an effort to redirect bank traffic to a fraudulent site. Or organizations would possibly also have a passive DNS collection procedure can detect if there is a sudden spike in rare server searches, for example, in Russia, an early indication that someone might be looking to launch a scam targeting employees.
This brings us to the court file that was registered on Friday. In this document, Durham expands on his articulation of what would have happened as the Alfa Bank rumor approached behind closed doors. The key detail of the document focuses on the knowledge of the DNS examined. :
The “particular healthcare provider” is said to be Spectrum Health, which, when the story first gave its impression in 2016, was known to be connected to Trump’s email server, but also provided reporters with the marketing spam that explained that connection.
It’s worth noting that Durham’s claim that knowledge is “being exploited” came early. Both Wheeler and Graham raised questions about the ethics of digging through collected DNS records to investigate anything that is likely outside of any agreement governing why knowledge is collected. . But this does not mean 1) that the legislation has been violated or 2) that it constitutes “piracy”. If I give you a key to my space and use it to go in and read my newspaper, I will definitely get angry with you. , however, it is not as if you have committed a robbery.
However, this is how the previous paragraph was conveyed. Fox News, for example, published an article about durham’s dossier with the headline “Clinton’s crusade paid to ‘infiltrate’ Trump Tower, the White House servers to link Trump to Russia: Durham. “There are some upheavals with this, adding the fact that the link between the Clinton team and the Perkins Coie Alfa Bank investigation is not straightforward, and Durham did not use the word ‘infiltrate,’ a word that suggests illicit access to the data. .
Instead, those two claims don’t come from Durham but, as the article says, from former Trump staff member Kash Patel. He is a complete Patel who makes Clinton’s claim and uses the word infiltrated. It was Patel, whose recent career has occasionally focused on backing up Trump’s claims that he was unfairly investigated, who drew the line Fox attributes to the special counsel (Fox News later updated its title).
Durham describes an attempt to attack Trump by stating that in a meeting with a government company in February 2017, Sussman alleged that DNS searches “demonstrated that Trump and/or his affiliates were employing allegedly infrequent and Russian-made cordless phones near the White House and of course, this does not help to go straight back to Clinton, since Trump didn’t spend much time in the White House while Clinton was still running for president. Durham’s dossier claims that studies targeting those phones date back to 2014, when Trump wasn’t even a candidate yet.
Update: In a record in response, Sussman’s lawyers write that the complex White House knowledge that was part of the review only covered a time when Obama was president. In other words, there is no “espionage” in Trump’s administration at all.
There are valid questions about the effort to link Trump to Russia. This knowledge was not only incomplete initially, but was also discredited at the end of the election. But there is no doubt that this is not evidence that Trump Tower has been “intervened. “”. This is not evidence that Mark Levin’s claims in early 2017 were accurate, because they were not. (He has tried to take credit for his foresight in recent days. )The former president has also claimed in recent days that it is a very broad type of espionage — compilation of the entire box — search for calls from a physical location or network — carried out not through the obama or Hillary Clinton administration, but through an anti-Trump lawyer. .
“In a more potent era in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death,” Trump said over the weekend, the kind of escalating rhetoric that isn’t mitigated by the fact that we’re so used to him doing so. Nor is it, as he said at the time, a bigger scandal than Watergate?
It’s exactly the same statement he made in March 2017: “How far did President Obama go to tap my phones in the very sacred election process?It’s Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!– long before this specific grounding of his claims was first generated.
This article has been updated.