The Robert Mueller Investigation

[Hugo Stiglitz 23356]

 

Edited May 13, 2019 by Hugo Stiglitz

[shnsajax 3589]

Did joe go to Notre Dame?

He burned it down.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Horn Under a Bad Sign 20342]

 

[The Royal We 3065]

Marcy Wheeler (@emptywheel) was particularly dismissive of this on Twitter last night without saying too much about why.  I saw a comment that asked how in the hell could Manafort use TOR when he couldn't even manipulate a .pdf - seemed like a pretty good point to me.

[Js1 85095]

Huh omg no way

 

[Francisco 2.0 32318]

17 minutes ago, The Royal We said:

Marcy Wheeler (@emptywheel) was particularly dismissive of this on Twitter last night without saying too much about why.  I saw a comment that asked how in the hell could Manafort use TOR when he couldn't even manipulate a .pdf - seemed like a pretty good point to me.

 

Tor would be easy to use (hell, my mom could use it), assuming one would use a tor-ready browser:

https://2019.www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en

 

 

 

 

[Captainant 27442]

36 minutes ago, The Royal We said:

Marcy Wheeler (@emptywheel) was particularly dismissive of this on Twitter last night without saying too much about why.  I saw a comment that asked how in the hell could Manafort use TOR when he couldn't even manipulate a .pdf - seemed like a pretty good point to me.

That's a really dumb take. Getting onto TOR is as easy as downloading a TOR browser and going to a .onion address on it. That's it. 

[horncyclist 1385]

4 minutes ago, Captainant said:

That's a really dumb take. Getting onto TOR is as easy as downloading a TOR browser and going to a .onion address on it. That's it. 

And someone could have set it up for him. Here's the New Yorker article on the Alfa bank contacts. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/15/was-there-a-connection-between-a-russian-bank-and-the-trump-campaign/amp

[The Royal We 3065]

My mistake, I know nothing at all about TOR and made a bad assumption that it took more than opening a browser.

[Anastasis 23393]

This is *huge* new info: Steele said Manafort was using an Alfa Bank server to secretly communicate with the Kremlin. This was before any of the Alfa Bank Trump Tower news broke.

 

This tweet is not an accurate representation.  Horncyclist's article provides the details. The pings had been discovered by July or so and were being examined in a smaller group.  In August that group went to a Times reporter. By late September there were multiple media stories in play, the FBI had become aware, and the FBI had called the Times reporter in to go over the reporting. Also in September, same Times reporter (as well as many other reporters) meets with Steele and Simpson to discuss investigation into Russian election related activities. It is likely at this meeting that Steele becomes aware of the potential for an alfa bank link between Trump and Russia, and the Times reporter provides Simpson and Steele with the data. If you read Simpson's testimony, he indicates that the alfa server information was not Fusion information (it was beyond their admitted level of competence), but that the information was coming from journalists. Steele then appropriated this angle in the pitch to State and Ohr as independent reporting and investigation.  Probably didn't hurt that he suspected that public reporting was on the horizon, and it would be interpreted as lending credibility to his own reporting. It's a weird web of bootstrapped circular corroboration.  Not the only example of such, the FBI used circular media corroboration of Steele's reporting in their FISA application.  It's a lot of shit to unwind it all.  Maybe twitter will put the pieces together.   

 

Edited May 14, 2019 by Anastasis

[F250 28679]

As I recall, the Alfa Bank, Trump Tower and Spectrum secret communications theory turned out to be hogwash.

 

 

[Anastasis 23393]

2 minutes ago, F250 said:

As I recall, the Alfa Bank, Trump Tower and Spectrum secret communications theory turned out to be hogwash.

That doesn’t mean that a half ass tweet can’t breathe it new life here.  

[Hugo Stiglitz 23356]

2 minutes ago, F250 said:

As I recall, the Alfa Bank, Trump Tower and Spectrum secret communications theory turned out to be hogwash.

 

 

There never was a solid theory. Lots of crazy speculation but no one really knew what the connection was about. 

[Anastasis 23393]

4 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

There never was a solid theory. Lots of crazy speculation but no one really knew what the connection was about. 

Steele apparently did, and briefed his connections at state a very specific fact pattern. 

It was actually a pretty shrewd move to build out a compelling piece of detailed reporting that he knew would get cover of plausibility when the times or another media source ran the reveal. 

Edited May 14, 2019 by Anastasis

[Hugo Stiglitz 23356]

1 minute ago, Anastasis said:

Steele apparently did, and briefed his connections at state a very specific fact pattern. 

So was it ever followed up on and verified? 

[Thetexashammer 1062]

Just now, Hugo Stiglitz said:

So was it ever followed up on and verified? 

Yes. Comey and others signed off on its accuracy, that it was verified, as part of the FISA application.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23356]

Fuck this, ill look into myself 

[Captainant 27442]

2 hours ago, Anastasis said:

This is *huge* new info: Steele said Manafort was using an Alfa Bank server to secretly communicate with the Kremlin. This was before any of the Alfa Bank Trump Tower news broke.

 

This tweet is not an accurate representation.  Horncyclist's article provides the details. The pings had been discovered by July or so and were being examined in a smaller group.  In August that group went to a Times reporter. By late September there were multiple media stories in play, the FBI had become aware, and the FBI had called the Times reporter in to go over the reporting. Also in September, same Times reporter (as well as many other reporters) meets with Steele and Simpson to discuss investigation into Russian election related activities. It is likely at this meeting that Steele becomes aware of the potential for an alfa bank link between Trump and Russia, and the Times reporter provides Simpson and Steele with the data. If you read Simpson's testimony, he indicates that the alfa server information was not Fusion information (it was beyond their admitted level of competence), but that the information was coming from journalists. Steele then appropriated this angle in the pitch to State and Ohr as independent reporting and investigation.  Probably didn't hurt that he suspected that public reporting was on the horizon, and it would be interpreted as lending credibility to his own reporting. It's a weird web of bootstrapped circular corroboration.  Not the only example of such, the FBI used circular media corroboration of Steele's reporting in their FISA application.  It's a lot of shit to unwind it all.  Maybe twitter will put the pieces together.   

 

Have you actually read that article? There's some pretty damning stuff in there that is evidence of intent and coordination between the trump campaign and "Alfa bank"

"One remarkable aspect of Foer’s story involved the way that the Trump domain had stopped working. On September 21st, he wrote, the Times had delivered potential evidence of communications to B.G.R., a Washington lobbying firm that worked for Alfa Bank. Two days later, the Trump domain vanished from the Internet. (Technically, its “A record,” which translates the domain name to an I.P. address, was deleted. If the D.N.S. is a phone book, the domain name was effectively decoupled from its number.) For four days, the servers at Alfa Bank kept trying to look up the Trump domain. Then, ten minutes after the last attempt, one of them looked up another domain, which had been configured to lead to the same Trump Organization server."

I put Alfa bank in quotes because the article also talks about how Russian firms usually have former Russian Intel officials in senior positions that are capable of co-opting "private" resources for government purposes. They also state they aren't aware of an Intel official in a senior position, but they don't state that they know it to be a fact. 

In addition, the trump campaign offered up an explanation for the DNS lookups that makes zero sense on a technical level, claiming the network activity was being driven by an existing banking customer of their hosting partner. That would be a huge no-no in the tech industry, and a violation of data security and integrity that a customer would be PISSED about. That leads me to believe they're lying, based on my own technical expertise and career. 

So would you rather pick at the edges of an issue and never actually talk about the evidence of malfeasance? Because there's strong evidence of something fucky going on, and the (multiple and varied) explanations provided by Alfa and the trump campaign don't stand up to scrutiny.  

[Thetexashammer 1062]

And here I was thinking that last horse had left the barn.

[F250 28679]

20 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

That doesn’t mean that a half ass tweet can’t breathe it new life here.  

I remember that Tea Pain guy and Mensch pumping the story on Twitter a couple of years ago. They along with other Twitter personalities were peddling some wild ass nonsensical theories.

At some point, a minor Twitter war erupted between members of the Resistance and actual cybersecurity experts. Which has happened on several occasions in the last couple of years. Self-appointed experts don't like being contradicted by actual experts.

 

[F250 28679]

Snopes has a pretty good summary on the history of the alleged Alfa Bank Trump Tower scandal.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-server-tied-to-russian-bank/

 

Another good piece on how the conspiracy theory got legs but never was supported by any law enforcement investigators.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/411209-move-over-grassy-knoll-the-trump-russia-bank-tale-joins-unproven

[Anastasis 23393]

16 minutes ago, Captainant said:

So would you rather pick at the edges of an issue

You guys are a hoot.  I addressed the core claim of the twatter, that Steele's briefing at State preceded public knowledge.  I infer that this was intended to suggest credibility and independence of his reporting.  I addressed that by demonstrating that I actually understand the timeline of issues at play, the various contacts between the involved individuals, and knowledge of the actual relevant testimony by Simpson regarding what Fusion knew on the issue and what sources they had obtained information from. You don't want to hear that, because thinking critically about shit asserted on the twatters challenges your strong prior. 

Edited May 14, 2019 by Anastasis

[Anastasis 23393]

14 minutes ago, F250 said:

I remember that Tea Pain guy and Mensch pumping the story on Twitter a couple of years ago. They along with other Twitter personalities were peddling some wild ass nonsensical theories.

At some point, a minor Twitter war erupted between members of the Resistance and actual cybersecurity experts. Which has happened on several occasions in the last couple of years. Self-appointed experts don't like being contradicted by actual experts.

That can't be true. I was told that, with singular exception, the fine citizens of Surly never uncritically peddled in Mensch nonsense.  And yet here we are again.  

Edited May 14, 2019 by Anastasis

[Captainant 27442]

3 minutes ago, F250 said:

Snopes has a pretty good summary on the history of the alleged Alfa Bank Trump Tower scandal.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-server-tied-to-russian-bank/

 

Another good piece on how the conspiracy theory got legs but never was supported by any law enforcement investigators.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/411209-move-over-grassy-knoll-the-trump-russia-bank-tale-joins-unproven

I'm by no means saying that the DNS entries prove malfeasance. I'm saying that they are strong evidence of it, and the explanations given by the trump campaign AND Alfa AND the hosting company do not make technical sense. There is more digging to be done there, as it was left untouched by the house republicans during their tenure as majority, and it hasn't been picked back up to actually follow through with subpoenas. 

Also for what it's worth, the op-ed author you posted used to be the editor in Chief for the washington times, a very "fair and balanced" news site. 

Bottom line is - much like several other issues - it didn't actually get investigated, but trump fans are treating it as a settled matter. 

If their explanations had made sense and been consistent, that would be one thing, and make me more apt to believe it really was mundane. But that hasn't been the case, hence my skepticism of the explanations coming from an administration that has lied over 10,000 times so far in office. 

[horncyclist 1385]

Three reasons the Alfa bank stuff is still interesting:

(1) Despite several independent analyses there's not a simple innocent explanation;

(2) The New Yorker article talks about the FBI investigating the Alfa Bank-Trump communication;

(3) The unredacted portions of the Mueller report are silent on it, what's under the redactions?

[Anastasis 23393]

9 minutes ago, horncyclist said:

Three reasons the Alfa bank stuff is still interesting:

(1) Despite several independent analyses there's not a simple innocent explanation;

(2) The New Yorker article talks about the FBI investigating the Alfa Bank-Trump communication;

(3) The unredacted portions of the Mueller report are silent on it, what's under the redactions?

If the server was the conduit by which the Trump campaign coordinated election interference with Russia, don't we think that Mueller would have reported that and it would have impacted his assessment of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia? We know that reporting indicated that they looked into SVB and Alfa.  It was reported that warrants including FISA surveillance were used in the investigation. 

 

I agree with your points and that the server remains an unresolved area of interest. There very well may be some relevant findings in the Mueller report under redaction. Those findings did not appear to impact his assessment of conspiracy or coordination. And to the point of the day, Steele reporting to State related to the server prior to the Slate piece doesn't bolster his credibility or reporting in any way.  

[Captainant 27442]

2 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

If the server was the conduit by which the Trump campaign coordinated election interference with Russia, don't we think that Mueller would have reported that and it would have impacted his assessment of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia? We know that reporting indicated that they looked into SVB and Alfa.  It was reported that warrants including FISA surveillance were used in the investigation. 

 

I agree with your points and that the server remains an unresolved area of interest. There very well may be some relevant findings in the Mueller report under redaction. Those findings did not appear to impact his assessment of conspiracy or coordination. And to the point of the day, Steele reporting to State related to the server prior to the Slate piece doesn't bolster his credibility or reporting in any way.  

Unless Barr decided we didn't need to know about that little detail when he was unilaterally deciding what the American public is allowed to see in the mueller report. I'm not arguing the credibility of the reporting or Steele, you're seemingly the only person doing that on this board. What I am arguing is that what's already been reported has left many many many unanswered questions and logical contradictions that people on the right are trying desperately to distract from or dismiss. 

[F250 28679]

52 minutes ago, Captainant said:

I'm by no means saying that the DNS entries prove malfeasance. I'm saying that they are strong evidence of it, and the explanations given by the trump campaign AND Alfa AND the hosting company do not make technical sense.

What technical evidence do you base this opinion on? Other than a handful of selected DNS logs which would be tossed out by any decent forensic team, there is nothing to suggest any malicious activity took place.

 

 

[henrygandorf 29174]

i'm sure this was covered at the time, but i just caught a replay of frontline on the mueller investigation from late march.

i'm sorry, but anyone on the right who is still claiming hoax or witch hunt, isn't stupid.  they don't have their head in the sand.  they're a straight up troll, giggling behind their keyboards and hoping things drag on and people forget in a river of new and creative bullshit from this sad man.  i had forgotten some of the details from 2 years ago, but this is concise enough to bring it all back.

the first 55 minutes or so are from the actual show, and i think the next 30 are discussion of the show.  i don't watch a ton of pbs (the occasional frontline, but typically non-political stuff).  that said, i don't recall ever hearing that pbs is anything more than possibly leaning a tad left.  this isn't the rachel maddow show.

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23356]

[Grade of D as in David 13253]

Can someone explain why there are 2nd 3rd and 4th deadlines? Are they in increasing order of severity? 

[Biff Tannen 45491]

1 minute ago, Grade of D as in David said:

Can someone explain why there are 2nd 3rd and 4th deadlines? Are they in increasing order of severity? 

I believe it is called a lack of spine.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23356]

1 minute ago, Grade of D as in David said:

Can someone explain why there are 2nd 3rd and 4th deadlines? Are they in increasing order of severity? 

Because the alternative is impeachment and we can't have that because this county is lost. 

[zork 629]

 

 

Maria talks to Lindsey about FISA, Barr, immigration, China, Venezuela, etc:

 

Maria back in '2016:

imgur>

 

 

[triplehorn 2664]

15 hours ago, horncyclist said:

Three reasons the Alfa bank stuff is still interesting:

(1) Despite several independent analyses there's not a simple innocent explanation;

(2) The New Yorker article talks about the FBI investigating the Alfa Bank-Trump communication;

(3) The unredacted portions of the Mueller report are silent on it, what's under the redactions?

 

Couple things here:

1) What's new about this Alfa bank/Trump tower communicating servers revelation is that Manafort allegedly communicated with Kremlin via TOR and a secret Alfa Bank server.  Previous reporting did not link any individual to the server interactions.

2) To benefit the Trump campaign, we definitively know Manafort was sharing polling data with Russians.  Given that, could it shed light on how or why Manafort would be communicating with Russians via a secret Alfa bank server ?

I noticed Tea Pain was mentioned again upthread.  He did write an interesting piece speculating about the meaning of the mysterious pattern of Trump Tower/Alfa bank server communications, which also incorporates Spectrum Health server:  

New Analysis Supports Database Replication Theory Between Trump Tower and Alfa Bank

Possibly, Manafort could have been using the server comms to build a shared database file between Russian agents for active measures, Trump campaign, and Spectrum Health.  Remember that Spectrum Health is based right in the same area, Michigan, that Manafort was focusing on when he shared the polling data with Russians targeting MI, OH, PA.

 

[GRHorn 105]

15 hours ago, Captainant said:

Unless Barr decided we didn't need to know about that little detail when he was unilaterally deciding what the American public is allowed to see in the mueller report. I'm not arguing the credibility of the reporting or Steele, you're seemingly the only person doing that on this board. What I am arguing is that what's already been reported has left many many many unanswered questions and logical contradictions that people on the right are trying desperately to distract from or dismiss. 

I’m pretty sure that’s incorrect. He wasn’t sitting at a desk with a sharpie marking through lines. 

[GRHorn 105]

7 minutes ago, zork said:

 

 

Maria talks to Lindsey about FISA, Barr, immigration, China, Venezuela, etc:

 

Maria back in '2016:

 

 

 

 

Money Honey

[Captainant 27442]

Just now, GRHorn said:

I’m pretty sure that’s incorrect. He wasn’t sitting at a desk with a sharpie marking through lines. 

No, but he's the last word in what is and isn't redacted. He's the last approval and nobody has had the will or the power to challenge his decisions. Which is why I categorize it as unilaterally deciding.

[triplehorn 2664]

16 hours ago, horncyclist said:

Three reasons the Alfa bank stuff is still interesting:

(1) Despite several independent analyses there's not a simple innocent explanation;

(2) The New Yorker article talks about the FBI investigating the Alfa Bank-Trump communication;

(3) The unredacted portions of the Mueller report are silent on it, what's under the redactions?

 

Re: "(3) The unredacted portions of the Mueller report are silent on it, what's under the redactions?"

In the last day or so, it's coming into focus that Mueller may not have investigated this stuff hardly at all.  The FBI is and has been.  And Trump is showing his hand again with his attacks:

Trump puts the FBI’s Chris Wray in the hot seat

^^^ Some good stuff there.  Unlike Barr, Wray is not Trump's stooge.  Without telling anyone, Trump impulsively picked Wray at the recommendation of Chris Christie in part due to being "simply tired" of looking for a Comey replacement.  Oops.

 

So yeah, we're probably going to need a new thread title covering FBI investigation of Trump/GOP treasonous corruption. yeehaw !

[Hugo Stiglitz 23356]

Wray is a Trump appointment.  He does not get the benefit of the doubt.  I feel like Rosenstein kind of fooled everyone and it could just as easily happen with Wray. 

[jimmyjazz 45546]

So . . . it appears that I was either unaware of a popular Trumpkin assertion that George Pap was set up by FBI/CIA to reveal info to the Australian diplomat, or it's a new tack.  Has this been a thing for a while now?  I'm seeing it all over social media.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23356]

3 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

So . . . it appears that I was either unaware of a popular Trumpkin assertion that George Pap was set up by FBI/CIA to reveal info to the Australian diplomat, or it's a new tack.  Has this been a thing for a while now?  I'm seeing it all over social media.

The seeds of the narrative were planted long ago.  Papadopolous is one of the biggest douchebag grifters in this shit show. 

[triplehorn 2664]

1 minute ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Wray is a Trump appointment.  He does not get the benefit of the doubt.  I feel like Rosenstein kind of fooled everyone and it could just as easily happen with Wray. 

Rosenstein and Wray are in different situations.  It's possible, if not highly likely, that Wray is directly involved in the counter-intelligence investigation into TrumpCo.  Rosenstein was not investigating.  For all his criticisms, Rosenstein held it together and enabled Mueller to do his work until Barr arrived and apparently put the kibosh on Mueller.  We should learn more about whether Barr forced Mueller's hand when Mueller testifies to Congress.  But to my knowledge, Rosenstein did nothing to obstruct or otherwise corrupt the process.  Could he have stepped up and taken a bullet ?  Maybe yes, but he's still functioning and the truth coming out ultimately will not be impacted by the DAG.

Unlike Rosenstein, Wray went out and directly opposed AG Barr and defended the work of the FBI in this matter (from the link above):

Quote

Circling back to our previous coverage, the story began in earnest about a month ago when Attorney General Bill Barr told a Senate committee “spying did occur” by the government on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Barr added, “I think spying on a political campaign – it’s a big deal, it’s a big deal.”

Despite the dubious and needlessly provocative nature of the attorney general’s comments – which he’s refused to retract – Republicans seized on Barr’s assessment, with the president’s re-election campaign even using his “spying” talk as the basis for political fundraising.

The FBI’s Chris Wray, however, took a more responsible stand during congressional testimony last week, making clear he was uncomfortable with the attorney general’s rhetoric.

For his trouble, the bureau’s director quickly found himself in the president’s crosshairs: Trump tweeted over the weekend that the FBI “has no leadership,” which was a rather pointed shot given that Trump was the one who handpicked Wray for the job. This morning, the president took another swing, despite the fact that there was nothing “ridiculous” about Wray’s testimony.

 

[zork 629]

10 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

So . . . it appears that I was either unaware of a popular Trumpkin assertion that George Pap was set up by FBI/CIA to reveal info to the Australian diplomat, or it's a new tack.  Has this been a thing for a while now?  I'm seeing it all over social media.

I don't know.  The OIG report coming this summer might shed more light.  Does seem to be some smoke about his hiring/quitting, travel and interesting contacts he made just before quitting to work on the Trump campaign, Lindsey talks about it in the interview linked above.  Should declassify all of it.  Probably won't happen. 

Pap has been ridiculed here for his idiocy.  Seems to make the perfect candidate for the stuff Lindsey refers to in the interview wrt FBI/CIA setups, perhaps.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23356]

17 minutes ago, triplehorn said:

Rosenstein and Wray are in different situations.  It's possible, if not highly likely, that Wray is directly involved in the counter-intelligence investigation into TrumpCo.  Rosenstein was not investigating.  For all his criticisms, Rosenstein held it together and enabled Mueller to do his work until Barr arrived and apparently put the kibosh on Mueller.  We should learn more about whether Barr forced Mueller's hand when Mueller testifies to Congress.  But to my knowledge, Rosenstein did nothing to obstruct or otherwise corrupt the process.  Could he have stepped up and taken a bullet ?  Maybe yes, but he's still functioning and the truth coming out ultimately will not be impacted by the DAG.

Unlike Rosenstein, Wray went out and directly opposed AG Barr and defended the work of the FBI in this matter (from the link above):

 

The way I see it Rosenstein was involved in multiple efforts to obstruct justice.  First with Sessions to fire Comey and then with the Barr spin job.  We have no idea how Rosenstein directed the Mueller investigation behind the scenes except for what we were allowed to see by him and Bill Barr.  We still haven’t heard a word from Mueller.  Everything we know about Rosenstein is coming from Rod Rosenstein. 

It’s good that Rosenstein held it together but he’s weak and placated Trump way too much. 

Wray doesn’t speak up enough when Trump attacks the FBI.  He seem like an inside player and the fact that he came from the Chris Christie world makes me feel worse about him. 

If I were Wray, I would want to stay as far away as possible from the counterintelligence investigation.  Inserting himself into it could jeopardize the whole thing.  

[Captainant 27442]

15 hours ago, F250 said:

What technical evidence do you base this opinion on? Other than a handful of selected DNS logs which would be tossed out by any decent forensic team, there is nothing to suggest any malicious activity took place.

Meant to reply to this yesterday, but outage happened. Here's some examples and data that I'm basing my argument on from the NewYorker article:

 

Quote

The Trump Organization had done little to clarify the matter. In October, 2016, it released a statement denying interactions with Alfa Bank “or any Russian entity.” Instead, it offered a peculiar explanation for the D.N.S. traffic: it had been triggered when “an existing banking customer of Cendyn”—the marketing firm—had used the company’s systems to send communications to Alfa Bank. Such a scenario would be highly irregular; it was as if Gmail had allowed a user to send e-mail from another user’s account. “It makes no sense,” Paul told me.

The bolded part is EXTREMELY unlikely, and would be almost certainly be legally actionable if not done with the hardware/system owner's consent. It is not a standard or even edge-case practice to allow third parties to use a customer's infrastructure, and it's not remotely normal to be that lackadaisical with network security unless you're pants-on-head retarded and don't give a flying fuck about data integrity/security.

Quote

A second possibility was marketing e-mail. After the Slate article appeared, some commentators suggested that Trump’s server had innocently sent promotional e-mails to Alfa Bank, and that a computer there had responded with queries designed to verify the identity of the sender. This became a catchall answer for anyone who couldn’t explain what had happened. “Either this is something innocuous, like spam,” Rachel Cohen, a press secretary for Senator Warner, told me, “or it’s completely nefarious.”

Alfa Bank had received Trump marketing e-mails in the past. But Cendyn had told CNN that it stopped sending e-mails for the Trump Organization in March, 2016, before the peculiar activity began; Trump had transferred his online marketing to another company, called Serenata. Jones’s team investigated, and found additional evidence that the server wasn’t sending marketing e-mails at the time. One indicator was the unusually limited traffic. Kramer, of Listrak, told me that a typical client sends “tens of thousands of e-mails a day” to huge numbers of recipients. If the Trump server was following that pattern, it would have generated significant D.N.S. traffic. To establish a kind of control group, Jones’s team asked Max to capture the D.N.S. logs for the Denihan Hospitality Group—a hotel chain, similar in size to Trump’s, which was using Cendyn and Listrak to send marketing e-mails. In a sample spanning August and September, 2016, a Denihan domain received more than twenty thousand D.N.S. queries, from more than a thousand I.P. addresses. In the same period, the Trump domain had twenty-five hundred lookups, nearly all of them from Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health.

This isn't necessarily an explanation directly from the trump campaign, but they've used a similar argument to attempt to debunk claims of malfeasance. This (for lack of a better term) lab work is hard data to support the argument that this so-called marketing server wasn't really marketing but rather communicating with a narrow group. Why lie about the purpose for the server?

Quote

Because Alfa Bank did not retain its D.N.S. logs (many large companies don’t), its assessments of what produced the lookups in early 2016 are necessarily speculative. “We are as mystified as anybody about these false allegations,” Birnbaum told me this September. In a series of exchanges over three weeks, he offered a range of possibilities. He suggested that the data had been faked, but also that they had been stolen from the bank’s logs. He attributed the traffic to kompromat, but also expounded a scenario in which it had been caused by a technical glitch: Trump e-mails “hidden” in the system were intermittently processed by the bank’s security software, an application called Trend Micro Deep Discovery Inspector. In this explanation, Trump marketing e-mails from before March, 2016, had made it through the spam filter and been stored in a permanent archive, where the bank backs up all its e-mail. Periodically, the bank re-scanned that archive, as updates to the security software provided new information about which senders might be unsafe. During scans, the system performed D.N.S. lookups for every domain name contained in every e-mail. In the course of several months, the bank said, this could account for the traffic.

...

In any case, for an explanation of this kind to work, it would require the servers at Spectrum Health to be simultaneously experiencing the same glitch, or another one with similar effects. (Spectrum declined to answer questions about its computer systems.) Trend Micro has thousands of users, most of them businesses, but in the sample that Max and his colleagues could see, only Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health exhibited this peculiar behavior.

This is a good example of the explanation given by Alfa requiring an incredible coincidence to occur to be possible. I'm not inclined to believe that something only if a series of very unlikely things had to occur, and you can't show or reproduce that those things occurred. It's far more likely that there was a second channel of communication happening that was driving this behavior, rather than a non reproducible bug.

Quote

Whatever the reason that the Trump domain vanished, Alfa Bank’s servers continued trying to look it up: Max’s group observed fifteen failed attempts that Friday, twenty-eight on Saturday, none on Sunday, ninety on Monday, twenty on Tuesday. Spectrum Health’s machine kept trying, too, in a weeklong spasm of activity that entailed thousands of seemingly automated lookups. Spectrum never succeeded in relocating the Trump server—but Alfa did. On the night of Tuesday, September 27th, ten minutes after the bank made its last failed attempt, it looked up the domain name trump1.contact-client.com—which was, it turned out, another route to the same Trump server.

The alternative domain name does not appear to have been previously active; no one has produced an e-mail sent from it. So how did Alfa find it? The easiest method would have been by consulting a ptrrecord, which shows what domain names are associated with a given I.P. address. But the ptr record for the Trump address did not include the alternative name.

This is an additional datapoint to bolster the speculation that a second communication channel was being utilized, as the information of the new DNS name was not publicly available via a PTR record. Computers don't just magically know what to query to find a domain, that's not how things work. The most likely way for the alfa server to know where to look is that someone from the trump world told someone in the alfa world what the new domain was. We do not know of any other way that information would just magically appear in alfa's servers.

 

So, all of that to say - I'm not arguing that this is proof of trump and alfa backchanneling, but I am arguing that their explanations and justifications don't make sense in context. That is a good reason to apply more scrutiny to this behavior, especially considering the potential ramifications of such covert behavior with respect to coordination with a hostile foreign power.

[zork 629]

1 hour ago, jimmyjazz said:

So . . . it appears that I was either unaware of a popular Trumpkin assertion that George Pap was set up by FBI/CIA to reveal info to the Australian diplomat, or it's a new tack.  Has this been a thing for a while now?  I'm seeing it all over social media.

 

1 hour ago, zork said:

I don't know.  The OIG report coming this summer might shed more light.  Does seem to be some smoke about his hiring/quitting, travel and interesting contacts he made just before quitting to work on the Trump campaign, Lindsey talks about it in the interview linked above.  Should declassify all of it.  Probably won't happen. 

Pap has been ridiculed here for his idiocy.  Seems to make the perfect candidate for the stuff Lindsey refers to in the interview wrt FBI/CIA setups, perhaps.

Also, this guy:

 

Was just appointed to check into any procedural or other difficulties in the early days, and before perhaps, of the investigation.  Apparently he has experience investigating IC agencies before, and shockingly, Mueller before as well, reportedly.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/443509-top-connecticut-federal-prosecutor-assigned-to-investigate-russia

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/us/politics/russia-investigation-justice-department-review.html

Spoiler

With the appointment of the U.S. attorney for Connecticut to investigate the origins of the probe into specious allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, a troika is now in place to get to the bottom of the biggest political scandal in American history: the weaponization of the federal government's law enforcement and Intelligence Community to sabotage a rival presidential campaign.  It is already public knowledge that the U.S. attorney for Utah, John Huber, was appointed by former A.G. Sessions to investigate the Clinton Foundation and surveillance abuses.  Inspector General Michael Horowitz is said to be investigating how the FBI handled the Steele dossier and Steele himself, as well as Stefan Halper, a CIA and FBI asset who attempted to lure George Papadopoulos into incriminating the Trump campaign by planting intelligence with him.

The appointment of Durham was not publicly announced, but reporters from outlets such as Fox News, USA Today, and the New York Times were quietly informed of the move.

...

Notably, the Boston abuses he investigated — that resulted in prison time for FBI agent John Connolly, who collaborated with crime boss White Bulger and framed four innocent men for murders that Bulger committed — involved Robert Mueller, who was assistant U.S. attorney and then acting U.S. attorney in Boston for much of the period.  Mueller "wrote letters to the parole and pardon boards throughout the 1980s opposing clemency for the four men framed by FBI lies."

...

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/_if_a_speedy_uncovering_of_corruption_is_an_issue_this_is_a_good_move.html

 

 

Edited May 15, 2019 by zork

[F250 28679]

47 minutes ago, Captainant said:

The bolded part is EXTREMELY unlikely, and would be almost certainly be legally actionable if not done with the hardware/system owner's consent. It is not a standard or even edge-case practice to allow third parties to use a customer's infrastructure, and it's not remotely normal to be that lackadaisical with network security unless you're pants-on-head retarded and don't give a flying fuck about data integrity/security. 

The email marketing server belonged to cendyn who outsourced the work to marketing company Listrek and then reassigned the server to another customer cendyn customer after the marketing campaign completed. This is a very common practice and happens all of the time.

 

1 hour ago, Captainant said:

This is an additional datapoint to bolster the speculation that a second communication channel was being utilized, as the information of the new DNS name was not publicly available via a PTR record. Computers don't just magically know what to query to find a domain, that's not how things work. The most likely way for the alfa server to know where to look is that someone from the trump world told someone in the alfa world what the new domain was. We do not know of any other way that information would just magically appear in alfa's servers.

According to research from Dyn, there were many sources other than Alfa that were performing this same lookup which means it wasn't unique to Alfa. Stale records showing up in MX queries, particularly with the type of setup that cendyn has isn't uncommon after changes are made. The important thing to remember here is that cendyn was always in control of the records, not the Trump organization.

 

1 hour ago, Captainant said:

So, all of that to say - I'm not arguing that this is proof of trump and alfa backchanneling, but I am arguing that their explanations and justifications don't make sense in context. That is a good reason to apply more scrutiny to this behavior, especially considering the potential ramifications of such covert behavior with respect to coordination with a hostile foreign power.

I personally think Trump was illegally involved with Russia however I don't see anything related to the DNS logs to indicate the marketing server explanation is untrue. In forensics you need to eliminate alternative explanations before drawing any conclusions and there isn't any data that eliminates the marketing server explanation.

[TtomTerrific 200]

Libtards scared shitlees of this cat "Barr"......know that. 

[jimmyjazz 45546]

1 minute ago, TtomTerrific said:

Libtards scared shitlees 

Are you drunk?

Don't answer.