31, the message was that Trump and Alfa Bank had been exonerated, and the server mystery disappeared from the public’s radar.Ĭontrary to what many expected, the Mueller Report did not even mention the server allegations, and when asked about the case during his July 2019 testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, Mueller was foggy in his response: “Do not know whether it’s true…It may well have been investigated, although it’s my belief at this point, it’s not true.” Given the enormous implications of the allegations, Mueller surely could have said more to put the story to rest.
But an FBI official subsequently told Lichtblau “that there could be an innocuous explanation for the computer traffic.” So when his story finally appeared on Oct. According to Filkins, later that month the agency persuaded the New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau to back off a story the paper planned to publish on the case because it would jeopardize the agency’s ongoing investigation. The FBI has been obfuscating about the Trump/Alfa server links ever since a lawyer for the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Michael Sussmann, told FBI General Counsel James Baker in mid-September 2016 about the findings of the computer scientists who had examined the data, and intelligence officials reportedly began briefing Congress about the mysterious connections around the same time. Mixed Messages from the Department of Justice It has never been suggested that Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization shared domain names. Claiming that he forgot the name of the bank involved, Parscale dismissed the server incident with a nonsensical statement: “Trump Org had done something on a server that for some service Cendyn was the provider of…And this other organization also used the same company for something else and they just happened to have the same DNS entry, which is very common.” The DNS queries were from dedicated IP addresses owned by Alfa Bank, not by a hosting company sharing IP addresses. Writing in the New Yorker in 2018, Dexter Filkins noted that computer scientists who examined the data theorized that the look-ups could have represented other forms of communication, such as data transfers or a technique called foldering (a digital form of “dead dropping”).īrad Parscale, the digital media director for Trump’s 2016 campaign, was even less helpful when questioned by the House Intelligence Committee in October 2017. But it was not just a question of emails.
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Was the committee told what kind of technical diligence the FBI carried out, or whether the FBI used the talent of cyber experts such as those at Carnegie Mellon University, the CIA and NSA?Īmazingly, the committee may have interviewed only one source–Jae Cho, the IT director for the Trump Organization, who “did not recall conducting a system-wide review of the Trump Organization network to determine if there were any connections from the Trump Organization side with any of the Alfa Bank servers.” According to the report, Cho “inferred” that Alfa Bank’s servers were configured in a way that they could not have been used to transmit emails to the Trump server. So, although committee members have high-level security clearances, they appear to remain in the dark about the reasons for the server communications. However, the Committee also could not positively determine an intent or purpose that would explain the unusual activity.”Īs stated on page 24 of the Senate report, the committee was not able to see the underlying records that the FBI used in its briefings to members. “Based on the FBI’s assessment, the Committee did not find the DNS activity reflected the existence of covert communication between Alfa Bank and Trump Organization personnel. Yet the long-awaited Senate report provides only this paltry, ambiguous conclusion: It has been almost four years since a group of computer scientists disclosed, on the basis of DNS (Domain Name System) logs, that two internet servers belonging to Alfa Bank had looked up the address of the Trump Organization server 2,820 times between May and September 2016.
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The recent release of the final volume of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian 2016 election interference and two new lawsuits by Russia’s Alfa Bank have brought back into the spotlight the puzzling lack of an explanation for the mysterious communications between the bank and the Trump Organization during the last presidential campaign.