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This broadcast was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
NB: This description contains material not contained in the original broadcast.
Introduction: With the (justifiable) outrage swirling around FBI director (and Mitt Romney backer) James Comey’s public discussion of the discovery of more of Hillary Clinton’s e‑mails having been discovered, another election-related investigation has gone largely unexamined. Indeed, the importance of the investigation has been downplayed.
Computer experts discovered a link between a server registered to the Trump organization and two servers registered to the Alfa Bank in Moscow, a bank that is part of the Alfa conglomerate discussed in FTR #‘s 530 and 573.
In the Foer piece, and in attempted discrediting articles of same, it is apparent that the investigators do not understand the nature of the entity they are investigating. The journalistic “spin” put on Alfa in the coverage is “Russia/Putin/Kremlin” new Cold War context. Alfa is very, very different.
Excerpted from the description for FTR #530:
“Introduction: This broadcast sets forth elements of a network that Mr. Emory believes to be a Bormann/Underground Reich network. This network was part of the apparatus involved in the execution of the 9/11 attacks.
Beginning with review of the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft and its role in bringing 9/11 hijack ringleader Mohamed Atta to Germany, the program traces the evidentiary tributaries running out of that organization. In addition to a fellowship operated on behalf of the Russian Alfa conglomerate, the CDG network also encompasses the Robert Bosch Foundation Fellowship.
The Alfa firm, in turn, has profound links to criminal syndicates in Asia, Russia and Latin America, as well as elements that participated in activities overlapping both the Iran-Contra and Iraqgate affairs. One of the central elements in this network is the royal family of Liechtenstein, a tiny European country that is an epicenter for money laundering.
In addition to participating in a front company that was part of the Al Taqwa constellation that funded Bin Laden, the Liechtenstein royal family (in 2001) assumed the powers of absolute monarchy, just in time to interdict any legal investigations that might have gone in the direction of 9/11. The head of the political party that fronted for Prince Hans Adam’s assumption of absolute power is a powerful lawyer who works for an Alfa subsidiary!
The dovetailing of powerful German capital interests apparently linked to the Bormann milieu with Russian oligarchic and criminal elements appears to be an outgrowth of traditional German “Ostpolitik.” For more about Ostpolitik, be sure to access Germany Plots with the Kremlin by T. H. Tetens, available for free downloading at: Spitfirelist.com/Books.
Program Highlights Include: The German industrial figures on the board of directors of the CDS; a history of the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft and its American subsidiary, the CDS; the Alfa Group’s links to Cheney’s Halliburton Oil company; the Alfa Group’s links to Iraqgate arms trafficking; the Alfa Group’s links to the oil-for-food scandal in Iraq; Alfa’s links to the Cali cocaine cartel of Colombia; Alfa’s links to heroin trafficking; Attorney Norbert Seeger’s role with Alfa subsidiary Crown Resources; Norbert Seeger’s role as head of the Progressive Citizens Party in Liechtenstein; links between Liechtenstein and the milieu of the CDU funding scandal; Atta’s father’s friendship with the German couple that sponsored Atta’s entry into Germany under the auspices of the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft; review of John P. Schmitz’s links to many of the entities and personalities discussed in the program. . . . .
More about this line of inquiry, excerpted from the description for FTR #573:
“Introduction: Continuing analysis of what British Prime Minister Tony Blair described as a “global network” behind the 9/11 attacks, this program details evidentiary tributaries between the powerful, well-connected and criminal Alfa consortium and people and institutions connected to the events of 9/11. A Russian company with what Mr. Emory describes as “more connections than a switchboard,” Alfa has links to Viktor Kozeny, the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft and to powerful people and institutions connected to the Bush administration. Kozeny is alleged to have participated in an Alfa scheme to defraud numerous U.S. investors and companies and is also the man who employed Wolfgang Bohringer, one of 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta’s German associates in Florida. The Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft sponsored Mohamed Atta’s entrance into Germany and, perhaps, Florida. That same Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft also maintains a fellowship on behalf of Alfa Group. Alfa’s activities in the United States are aided and abetted by the powerful lobbying firm of Barbour, Griffith and Rogers, intimately connected to the administration of George W. Bush. Hans Bodmer and Pyotr Aven (two of Kozeny’s associates in a scheme to gain control of the state oil company of Azerbaijan) are also alleged to have worked with Kozeny and Alfa in the defrauding of IPOC. The global network to which Blair referred and that supported the 9/11 hijackers embodies a fusion of the underworld and the overworld. Engaged in drug trafficking on several continents, this network also operates in conjunction with powerful corporate entities in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and the United States. FTR#’s 433, 530, 536, 570 supplement the information presented here and should be examined in order to gain a firmer understanding of this complex network. As Mr. Emory noted in the broadcast, “If this seems confusing, it is meant to be!”
Program Highlights Include: Links between the Alfa group and the royal family of Liechtenstein; links between the royal family of Liechtenstein and the milieu of 9/11; Haley Barbour (of Barbour, Griffith and Rogers) and his business connections with companies belonging to the business empire of former Nazi spy and apparent Al Qaeda financier Youssef Nada; the apparently illegal operations performed by GOP bigwig Ed Rogers’ Diligence Inc. security firm on behalf of Alfa; the wall of secrecy surrounding the identity of the Germans sponsors of Atta’s activities under the auspices of the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft. . . .”
Listeners/readers are emphatically encouraged to examine the descriptions and audio files of these linkjed programs to further flesh out their understanding of the Alfa group.
Suffice it to say, this is NOT “Kremlin/Putin/Russia” new Cold War stuff at all. Rather, the Alfa Fellowship and the many links of this organization suggest that this is a Bormann/Underground Reich entity.
The original Foer piece sets forth a number of interesting aspects of the Trump/Alfa Bank server link:
- The Trump/Alfa link was not a malware attack, as some of the computer scientists initially thought: ” . . . . The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn’t the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation—conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank. . . .”
- The set-up was highly unusual: ” . . . . The researchers had initially stumbled in their diagnosis because of the odd configuration of Trump’s server. ‘I’ve never seen a server set up like that,’ says Christopher Davis, who runs the cybersecurity firm HYAS InfoSec Inc. and won a FBI Director Award for Excellence for his work tracking down the authors of one of the world’s nastiest botnet attacks. ‘It looked weird, and it didn’t pass the sniff test.’ The server was first registered to Trump’s business in 2009 and was set up to run consumer marketing campaigns. It had a history of sending mass emails on behalf of Trump-branded properties and products. Researchers were ultimately convinced that the server indeed belonged to Trump. (Click here to see the server’s registration record.) But now this capacious server handled a strangely small load of traffic, such a small load that it would be hard for a company to justify the expense and trouble it would take to maintain it. ‘I get more mail in a day than the server handled,’ Davis says. . . .”
- The article details more unusual aspects of the link: ” . . . . That wasn’t the only oddity. When the researchers pinged the server, they received error messages. They concluded that the server was set to accept only incoming communication from a very small handful of IP addresses. . . . Eighty-seven percent of the DNS lookups involved the two Alfa Bank servers. ‘It’s pretty clear that it’s not an open mail server,’ Camp told me. ‘These organizations are communicating in a way designed to block other people out.’ . . . .”
- Paul Vixie–one of the premier experts in the field–felt the connection was highly unusual: ” . . . . Earlier this month, the group of computer scientists passed the logs to Paul Vixie. In the world of DNS experts, there’s no higher authority. Vixie wrote central strands of the DNS code that makes the internet work. After studying the logs, he concluded, ‘The parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive. This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project.’ Put differently, the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence. . . .”
- The available evidence indicates that the hookup indicated “human-level communication”: ” . . . I put the question of what kind of activity the logs recorded to the University of California’s Nicholas Weaver, another computer scientist not involved in compiling the logs. ‘I can’t attest to the logs themselves,’ he told me, ‘but assuming they are legitimate they do indicate effectively human-level communication.’ . . . ”
- More about the nature of the communication, from the scientist using the code-name “Tea Leaves”: ” . . . . Tea Leaves and his colleagues plotted the data from the logs on a timeline. What it illustrated was suggestive: The conversation between the Trump and Alfa servers appeared to follow the contours of political happenings in the United States. ‘At election-related moments, the traffic peaked,’ according to Camp. There were considerably more DNS lookups, for instance, during the two conventions. . . .”
- The scientists attempted to get the public to pay attention to their investigation and New York Times writers turned their attention to the case: ” . . . In September, the scientists tried to get the public to pay attention to their data. One of them posted a link to the logs in a Reddit thread. Around the same time, the New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers began chasing the story.* (They are still pursuing it.) Lichtblau met with a Washington representative of Alfa Bank on Sept. 21, and the bank denied having any connection to Trump. . . .”
- Things got “interesting” after that. According to the computer scientists, the Trump Organization shut down the server! As the brilliant Berkeley researcher Peter Dale Scott noted, in a different context, “The cover-up obviates the conspiracy. ” . . . . In September, the scientists tried to get the public to pay attention to their data. One of them posted a link to the logs in a Reddit thread. Around the same time, the New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers began chasing the story.* (They are still pursuing it.) Lichtblau met with a Washington representative of Alfa Bank on Sept. 21, and the bank denied having any connection to Trump. . . . The computer scientists believe there was one logical conclusion to be drawn: The Trump Organization shut down the server after Alfa was told that the Times might expose the connection. Weaver told me the Trump domain was ‘very sloppily removed.’ Or as another of the researchers put it, it looked like ‘the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.’. . . . Four days later, on Sept. 27, the Trump Organization created a new host name, trump1.contact-client.com, which enabled communication to the very same server via a different route. When a new host name is created, the first communication with it is never random. To reach the server after the resetting of the host name, the sender of the first inbound mail has to first learn of the name somehow. It’s simply impossible to randomly reach a renamed server. ‘That party had to have some kind of outbound message through SMS, phone, or some noninternet channel they used to communicate [the new configuration],’ Paul Vixie told me. The first attempt to look up the revised host name came from Alfa Bank. ‘If this was a public server, we would have seen other traces,’ Vixie says. ‘The only look-ups came from this particular source.‘According to Vixie and others, the new host name may have represented an attempt to establish a new channel of communication. But media inquiries into the nature of Trump’s relationship with Alfa Bank, which suggested that their communications were being monitored, may have deterred the parties from using it. Soon after the New York Times began to ask questions, the traffic between the servers stopped cold. . . .”
After highlighting the Foer story on the Trump/Alfa connection, the program notes the official dismissal of the story. “. . . . Foer mentions in his piece that the New York Times was investigating the link. On Monday, the paper reported that the FBI had looked into and dismissed the idea that the two servers represented a secret communications channel. Investigators “concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts,” the Times’ Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers reported. . . . ”
The concluding portion of the program notes that there are interesting evidentiary tributaries between Alfa, the business entities of commodities dealer Marc Rich and the investigations into Rich and Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich.
Program Highlights Include:
- The unsuccessful attempt by Alfa subsidiary Crown Resources to buy Marc Rich’s commodities firm: ” . . . A deal to sell the Swiss-based commodities operation of former U.S. fugitive financier Marc Rich to Russia-owned energy trading group Crown Resources is off. . . . Crown is owned by the Alfa Group conglomerate. . . . .”
- The subsequent successful attempt by Alfa player Mikhail Fridman to purchase the Marc Rich firm: ” . . . Mikhail Fridman: ‘Defendant Mikhail Fridman currently serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of co-conspirator Alfa Bank and as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Defendant Consortium Alfa Group. Fridman further served on the Board of VimpelCom, a NYSE company, and has control over Golden Telecom, a NASDAQ company ... purchased the United States trading firm owned by American, Mark Rich, the one time commodities baron pardoned by President Clinton with much controversy. . . .”
- The FBI’s long-dormant Twitter account began tweeting files about Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, shortly after the official dismissal of investigations into the Alfa/Trump link: ” . . . . Now, a new interagency mystery is raising questions about whether the F.B.I. has become politicized, just days before the presidential election. On Sunday, a long-dormant F.B.I. Twitter account suddenly sprung to life, blasting out a series of links to case files that cast the Clintons in a decidedly negative light. . . . Then, on Tuesday, the “FBI Records Vault” account—which had not tweeted at all between October 2015 and Sunday—published a link to records related to the 15-year-old, long-closed investigation into former President Bill Clinton’s pardoning of onetime commodities trader turned fugitive Marc Rich. The post, which was quickly retweeted thousands of times, links to a heavily redacted document that repeatedly references the agency’s “Public Corruption” unit—less-than-ideal optics for Hillary Clinton, who has spent her entire campaign fighting her image as a corrupt politician. . . .”
- FBI Director James Comey was in charge of the original Marc Rich investigation and the pardon of Rich by Bill Clinton. Is there a connection between the official dismissal of the investigation into the Alfa/Trump link by the FBI, the tweeting by the FBI of the files on the Clinton pardon of Marc Rich and the fact that it was Comey who presided over the Marc Rich investigations? ” . . . . In 2002, Comey, then a federal prosecutor, took over an investigation into President Bill Clinton’s 2001 pardon of financier Marc Rich, who had been indicted on a laundry list of charges before fleeing the country. The decision set off a political firestorm focused on accusations that Rich’s ex-wife Denise made donations to the Democratic Party, the Clinton Library and Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign as part of a plan to get Rich off the hook. Comey ultimately decided not to pursue the case. The kicker: Comey himself had overseen Rich’s prosecution between 1987 and 1993. . . .”
This discussion will be continued at greater length in the next program.
1. The original story about the Trump organization/Alfa Bank servers was broken by Franklin Foer.
“Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?” by Franklin Foer; Slate; 10/31/2016.
This spring, a group of computer scientists set out to determine whether hackers were interfering with the Trump campaign. They found something they weren’t expecting.
The greatest miracle of the internet is that it exists—the second greatest is that it persists. Every so often we’re reminded that bad actors wield great skill and have little conscience about the harm they inflict on the world’s digital nervous system. They invent viruses, botnets, and sundry species of malware. There’s good money to be made deflecting these incursions. But a small, tightly knit community of computer scientists who pursue such work—some at cybersecurity firms, some in academia, some with close ties to three-letter federal agencies—is also spurred by a sense of shared idealism and considers itself the benevolent posse that chases off the rogues and rogue states that try to purloin sensitive data and infect the internet with their bugs. “We’re the Union of Concerned Nerds,” in the wry formulation of the Indiana University computer scientist L. Jean Camp.
In late spring, this community of malware hunters placed itself in a high state of alarm. Word arrived that Russian hackers had infiltrated the servers of the Democratic National Committee, an attack persuasively detailed by the respected cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The computer scientists posited a logical hypothesis, which they set out to rigorously test: If the Russians were worming their way into the DNC, they might very well be attacking other entities central to the presidential campaign, including Donald Trump’s many servers. “We wanted to help defend both campaigns, because we wanted to preserve the integrity of the election,” says one of the academics, who works at a university that asked him not to speak with reporters because of the sensitive nature of his work.
Hunting for malware requires highly specialized knowledge of the intricacies of the domain name system—the protocol that allows us to type email addresses and website names to initiate communication. DNS enables our words to set in motion a chain of connections between servers, which in turn delivers the results we desire. Before a mail server can deliver a message to another mail server, it has to look up its IP address using the DNS. Computer scientists have built a set of massive DNS databases, which provide fragmentary histories of communications flows, in part to create an archive of malware: a kind of catalog of the tricks bad actors have tried to pull, which often involve masquerading as legitimate actors. These databases can give a useful, though far from comprehensive, snapshot of traffic across the internet. Some of the most trusted DNS specialists—an elite group of malware hunters, who work for private contractors—have access to nearly comprehensive logs of communication between servers. They work in close concert with internet service providers, the networks through which most of us connect to the internet, and the ones that are most vulnerable to massive attacks. To extend the traffic metaphor, these scientists have cameras posted on the internet’s stoplights and overpasses. They are entrusted with something close to a complete record of all the servers of the world connecting with one another.
In late July, one of these scientists—who asked to be referred to as Tea Leaves, a pseudonym that would protect his relationship with the networks and banks that employ him to sift their data—found what looked like malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain had Trump in its name, which of course attracted Tea Leaves’ attention. But his discovery of the data was pure happenstance—a surprising needle in a large haystack of DNS lookups on his screen. “I have an outlier here that connects to Russia in a strange way,” he wrote in his notes. He couldn’t quite figure it out at first. But what he saw was a bank in Moscow that kept irregularly pinging a server registered to the Trump Organization on Fifth Avenue.
More data was needed, so he began carefully keeping logs of the Trump server’s DNS activity. As he collected the logs, he would circulate them in periodic batches to colleagues in the cybersecurity world. Six of them began scrutinizing them for clues.
(I communicated extensively with Tea Leaves and two of his closest collaborators, who also spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, since they work for firms trusted by corporations and law enforcement to analyze sensitive data. They persuasively demonstrated some of their analytical methods to me—and showed me two white papers, which they had circulated so that colleagues could check their analysis. I also spoke with academics who vouched for Tea Leaves’ integrity and his unusual access to information. “This is someone I know well and is very well-known in the networking community,” said Camp. “When they say something about DNS, you believe them. This person has technical authority and access to data.”)
The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn’t the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation—conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.
The researchers had initially stumbled in their diagnosis because of the odd configuration of Trump’s server. “I’ve never seen a server set up like that,” says Christopher Davis, who runs the cybersecurity firm HYAS InfoSec Inc. and won a FBI Director Award for Excellence for his work tracking down the authors of one of the world’s nastiest botnet attacks. “It looked weird, and it didn’t pass the sniff test.” The server was first registered to Trump’s business in 2009 and was set up to run consumer marketing campaigns. It had a history of sending mass emails on behalf of Trump-branded properties and products. Researchers were ultimately convinced that the server indeed belonged to Trump. (Click here to see the server’s registration record.) But now this capacious server handled a strangely small load of traffic, such a small load that it would be hard for a company to justify the expense and trouble it would take to maintain it. “I get more mail in a day than the server handled,” Davis says.
That wasn’t the only oddity. When the researchers pinged the server, they received error messages. They concluded that the server was set to accept only incoming communication from a very small handful of IP addresses. A small portion of the logs showed communication with a server belonging to Michigan-based Spectrum Health. (The company said in a statement: “Spectrum Health does not have a relationship with Alfa Bank or any of the Trump organizations. We have concluded a rigorous investigation with both our internal IT security specialists and expert cyber security firms. Our experts have conducted a detailed analysis of the alleged internet traffic and did not find any evidence that it included any actual communications (no emails, chat, text, etc.) between Spectrum Health and Alfa Bank or any of the Trump organizations. While we did find a small number of incoming spam marketing emails, they originated from a digital marketing company, Cendyn, advertising Trump Hotels.”)
Spectrum accounted for a relatively trivial portion of the traffic. Eighty-seven percent of the DNS lookups involved the two Alfa Bank servers. “It’s pretty clear that it’s not an open mail server,” Camp told me. “These organizations are communicating in a way designed to block other people out.”
Earlier this month, the group of computer scientists passed the logs to Paul Vixie. In the world of DNS experts, there’s no higher authority. Vixie wrote central strands of the DNS code that makes the internet work. After studying the logs, he concluded, “The parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive. This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project.” Put differently, the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence. Over the summer, the scientists observed the communications trail from a distance.
* * *
While the researchers went about their work, the conventional wisdom about Russian interference in the campaign began to shift. There were reports that the Trump campaign had ordered the Republican Party to rewrite its platform position on Ukraine, maneuvering the GOP toward a policy preferred by Russia, though the Trump campaign denied having a hand in the change. Then Trump announced in an interview with the New York Times his unwillingness to spring to the defense of NATO allies in the face of a Russian invasion. Trump even invited Russian hackers to go hunting for Clinton’s emails, then passed the comment off as a joke. (I wrote about Trump’s relationship with Russia in early July.)
In the face of accusations that he is somehow backed by Putin or in business with Russian investors, Trump has issued categorical statements. “I mean I have nothing to do with Russia,” he told one reporter, a flat denial that he repeated over and over. Of course, it’s possible that these statements are sincere and even correct. The sweeping nature of Trump’s claim, however, prodded the scientists to dig deeper. They were increasingly confident that they were observing data that contradicted Trump’s claims.
In the parlance that has become familiar since the Edward Snowden revelations, the DNS logs reside in the realm of metadata. We can see a trail of transmissions, but we can’t see the actual substance of the communications. And we can’t even say with complete certitude that the servers exchanged email. One scientist, who wasn’t involved in the effort to compile and analyze the logs, ticked off a list of other possibilities: an errant piece of spam caroming between servers, a misdirected email that kept trying to reach its destination, which created the impression of sustained communication. “I’m seeing a preponderance of the evidence, but not a smoking gun,” he said. Richard Clayton, a cybersecurity researcher at Cambridge University who was sent one of the white papers laying out the evidence, acknowledges those objections and the alternative theories but considers them improbable. “I think mail is more likely, because it’s going to a machine running a mail server and [the host] is called mail. Dr. Occam says you should rule out mail before pulling out the more exotic explanations.” After Tea Leaves posted his analysis on Reddit, a security blogger who goes by Krypt3ia expressed initial doubts—but his analysis was tarnished by several incorrect assumptions, and as he examined the matter, his skepticism of Tea Leaves softened somewhat.
I put the question of what kind of activity the logs recorded to the University of California’s Nicholas Weaver, another computer scientist not involved in compiling the logs. “I can’t attest to the logs themselves,” he told me, “but assuming they are legitimate they do indicate effectively human-level communication.”
Weaver’s statement raises another uncertainty: Are the logs authentic? Computer scientists are careful about vouching for evidence that emerges from unknown sources—especially since the logs were pasted in a text file, where they could conceivably have been edited. I asked nine computer scientists—some who agreed to speak on the record, some who asked for anonymity—if the DNS logs that Tea Leaves and his collaborators discovered could be forged or manipulated. They considered it nearly impossible. It would be easy enough to fake one or maybe even a dozen records of DNS lookups. But in the aggregate, the logs contained thousands of records, with nuances and patterns that not even the most skilled programmers would be able to recreate on this scale. “The data has got the right kind of fuzz growing on it,” Vixie told me. “It’s the interpacket gap, the spacing between the conversations, the total volume. If you look at those time stamps, they are not simulated. This bears every indication that it was collected from a live link.” I asked him if there was a chance that he was wrong about their authenticity. “This passes the reasonable person test,” he told me. “No reasonable person would come to the conclusion other than the one I’ve come to.” Others were equally emphatic. “It would be really, really hard to fake these,” Davis said. According to Camp, “When the technical community examined the data, the conclusion was pretty obvious.”
It’s possible to impute political motives to the computer scientists, some of whom have criticized Trump on social media. But many of the scientists who talked to me for this story are Republicans. And almost all have strong incentives for steering clear of controversy. Some work at public institutions, where they are vulnerable to political pressure. Others work for firms that rely on government contracts—a relationship that tends to squash positions that could be misinterpreted as outspoken.
* * *
…
Alfa’s oligarchs occupied an unusual position in Putin’s firmament. They were insiders but not in the closest ring of power. “It’s like they were his judo pals,” one former U.S. government official who knows Fridman told me. “They were always worried about where they stood in the pecking order and always feared expropriation.” Fridman and Aven, however, are adept at staying close to power. As the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia once ruled, in the course of dismissing a libel suit the bankers filed, “Aven and Fridman have assumed an unforeseen level of prominence and influence in the economic and political affairs of their nation.”
Unlike other Russian firms, Alfa has operated smoothly and effortlessly in the West. It has never been slapped with sanctions. Fridman and Aven have cultivated a reputation as beneficent philanthropists. They endowed a prestigious fellowship. The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the American-government funded think tank, gave Aven its award for “Corporate Citizenship” in 2015. To protect its interests in Washington, Alfa hired as its lobbyist former Reagan administration official Ed Rogers. Richard Burt, who helped Trump write the speech in which he first laid out his foreign policy, serves on Alfa’s senior advisory board. The branding campaign has worked well. During the first Obama term, Fridman and Aven met with officials in the White House on two occasions, according to visitor logs.
Fridman and Aven have significant business interests to promote in the West. One of their holding companies, LetterOne, has vowed to invest as much as $3 billion in U.S. health care. This year, it sank $200 million into Uber. This is, of course, money that might otherwise be invested in Russia. According to a former U.S. official, Putin tolerates this condition because Alfa advances Russian interests. It promotes itself as an avatar of Russian prowess. “It’s our moral duty to become a global player, to prove a Russian can transform into an international businessman,” Fridman told the Financial Times.
* * *
Tea Leaves and his colleagues plotted the data from the logs on a timeline. What it illustrated was suggestive: The conversation between the Trump and Alfa servers appeared to follow the contours of political happenings in the United States. “At election-related moments, the traffic peaked,” according to Camp. There were considerably more DNS lookups, for instance, during the two conventions.
In September, the scientists tried to get the public to pay attention to their data. One of them posted a link to the logs in a Reddit thread. Around the same time, the New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers began chasing the story.* (They are still pursuing it.) Lichtblau met with a Washington representative of Alfa Bank on Sept. 21, and the bank denied having any connection to Trump.(Lichtblau told me that Times policy prevents him from commenting on his reporting.)
The Times hadn’t yet been in touch with the Trump campaign—Lichtblau spoke with the campaign a week later—but shortly after it reached out to Alfa, the Trump domain name in question seemed to suddenly stop working. When the scientists looked up the host, the DNS server returned a fail message, evidence that it no longer functioned. Or as it is technically diagnosed, it had “SERVFAILed.” (On the timeline above, this is the moment at the end of the chronology when the traffic abruptly spikes, as servers frantically attempt to resend rejected messages.) The computer scientists believe there was one logical conclusion to be drawn: The Trump Organization shut down the server after Alfa was told that the Times might expose the connection. Weaver told me the Trump domain was “very sloppily removed.” Or as another of the researchers put it, it looked like “the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.”
Four days later, on Sept. 27, the Trump Organization created a new host name, trump1.contact-client.com, which enabled communication to the very same server via a different route. When a new host name is created, the first communication with it is never random. To reach the server after the resetting of the host name, the sender of the first inbound mail has to first learn of the name somehow. It’s simply impossible to randomly reach a renamed server. “That party had to have some kind of outbound message through SMS, phone, or some noninternet channel they used to communicate [the new configuration],” Paul Vixie told me. The first attempt to look up the revised host name came from Alfa Bank. “If this was a public server, we would have seen other traces,” Vixie says. “The only look-ups came from this particular source.”
According to Vixie and others, the new host name may have represented an attempt to establish a new channel of communication. But media inquiries into the nature of Trump’s relationship with Alfa Bank, which suggested that their communications were being monitored, may have deterred the parties from using it. Soon after the New York Times began to ask questions, the traffic between the servers stopped cold.
* * *
Last week, I wrote to Alfa Bank asking if it could explain why its servers attempted to connect with the Trump Organization on such a regular basis. Its Washington representative, Jeffrey Birnbaum of the public relations firm BGR, provided me the following response:
Alfa hired Mandiant, one of the world’s foremost cyber security experts, to investigate and it has found nothing to the allegations. I hope the below answers respond clearly to your questions. Neither Alfa Bank nor its principals, including Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, have or have had any contact with Mr. Trump or his organizations. Fridman and Aven have never met Mr. Trump nor have they or Alfa Bank had any business dealings with him. Neither Alfa nor its officers have sent Mr. Trump or his organizations any emails, information or money. Alfa Bank does not have and has never had any special or exclusive internet connection with Mr. Trump or his entities. The assertion of a special or private link is patently false.
I asked Birnbaum if he would connect me with Mandiant to elaborate on its findings. He told me:
Mandiant is still doing its deep dive into the Alfa Bank systems. Its leading theory is that Alfa Bank’s servers may have been responding with common DNS look ups to spam sent to it by a marketing server. But it doesn’t want to speak on the record until it’s finished its investigation.
It’s hard to evaluate the findings of an investigation that hasn’t ended. And of course, even the most reputable firm in the world isn’t likely to loudly broadcast an opinion that bites the hand of its client.
I posed the same basic questions to the Trump campaign. Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks sent me this in response to my questions by email:
The email server, set up for marketing purposes and operated by a third-party, has not been used since 2010. The current traffic on the server from Alphabank’s [sic] IP address is regular DNS server traffic—not email traffic. To be clear, The Trump Organization is not sending or receiving any communications from this email server. The Trump Organization has no communication or relationship with this entity or any Russian entity.
I asked Hicks to explain what caused the Trump Organization to rename its host after the New York Times called Alfa. I also asked how the Trump Organization arrived at its judgment that there was no email traffic. (Furthermore, there’s no such thing as “regular” DNS server traffic, at least not according to the computer scientists I consulted. The very reason DNS exists is to enable email and other means of communication.) She never provided me with a response.
What the scientists amassed wasn’t a smoking gun. It’s a suggestive body of evidence that doesn’t absolutely preclude alternative explanations. But this evidence arrives in the broader context of the campaign and everything else that has come to light: The efforts of Donald Trump’s former campaign managerto bring Ukraine into Vladimir Putin’s orbit; the other Trump adviser whose communications with senior Russian officials have worried intelligence officials; the Russian hacking of the DNC and John Podesta’s email.
We don’t yet know what this server was for, but it deserves further explanation.
“Earlier this month, the group of computer scientists passed the logs to Paul Vixie. In the world of DNS experts, there’s no higher authority. Vixie wrote central strands of the DNS code that makes the internet work. After studying the logs, he concluded, “The parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive. This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project.” Put differently, the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence. Over the summer, the scientists observed the communications trail from a distance.”
Well, that is quite a bombshell if it pans out. Maybe not exactly the bombshell that the emerging coverage of the story will depict, but still quite a bombshell
2. Officialdom, including the mainstream media, have (according to the FBI) dismissed any notion of a Trump/Alfa link:
“. . . . Foer mentions in his piece that the New York Times was investigating the link. On Monday, the paper reported that the FBI had looked into and dismissed the idea that the two servers represented a secret communications channel. Investigators “concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts,” the Times’ Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers reported. . . . ”
Of all the things that were going to get Donald Trump into trouble over the course of this election, I would have put “automated computer server activity” pretty low on the list. But here we are.
On Monday night, Slate published a lengthy story written by Franklin Foer exploring an odd connection between Trump’s businesses and a bank in Russia. . . . .
. . . . Foer mentions in his piece that the New York Times was investigating the link. On Monday, the paper reported that the FBI had looked into and dismissed the idea that the two servers represented a secret communications channel. Investigators “concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts,” the Times’ Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers reported. . . .
3a. Crown Resources and other Crown entities are part of the Alfa Group, one of whose outgrowths is the CDS subsidiary program the Alfa Fellowship. Note that Mark Rich’s commodities operation was negotiating with Alfa subsidiary Crown resources over a buyout. That buyout didn’t happen, but another one did.
“Mark Rich Deal to Sell Commodities Operation to Russian Group Fails” [AP]; 6/8/2001.
. . . . A deal to sell the Swiss-based commodities operation of former U.S. fugitive financier Marc Rich to Russia-owned energy trading group Crown Resources is off. . . . Crown is owned by the Alfa Group conglomerate. . . . .
3b. Alfa player Mikhail Fridman did purchase Marc Rich’s firm. (Most outlets spell Rich’s first name as “Marc.”)
. . . . Mikhail Fridman: ‘Defendant Mikhail Fridman currently serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of co-conspirator Alfa Bank and as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Defendant Consortium Alfa Group. Fridman further served on the Board of VimpelCom, a NYSE company, and has control over Golden Telecom, a NASDAQ company ... purchased the United States trading firm owned by American, Mark Rich, the one time commodities baron pardoned by President Clinton with much controversy. Fridman purports to have become a philanthropist in the United States’ and is a member of the Board of the Council on Foreign Relations based in New York. [pgs. 6–7] Pyotr Aven: ‘Defendant Pyotr Aven also has been a major participant in the scheme and worked directly with Rozhetskin and Fridman in the misappropriation and theft of IPOC monies. Aven is a director of Golden Telecom, a NASDAQ company, which regularly files with the United States Securities Exchange Commission. He is a controversial figure: As observed by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, a Russian ‘corruption task force informed [the government] that Aven was engaged in various misdeeds, including drug trafficking. See OAO Alfa Bank v. Center for Public Integrity, Civ. Action No. 00–2208 (JDB), Mem. Op., Sept. 22, 2005 at 11 n.26.’ [pg. 8] . . . .
4. Right around the same time people started wondering if the reason James Comey threw Hillary’s email server investigation right into the middle of the campaign, someone at the FBI decides to throw a whole bunch of other old Clinton investigations into the campaign.
Also note regarding the tweet about Marc Rich that James Comey oversaw Rich’s prosecution from 1987–1993 and took over the investigation of Bill Clinton’s Marc Rich pardon in 2002. So it sounds like a faction of the FBI agents has decided to join the Team Trump Troll Squad a week before the election. It raises the question of whether or not these agents are driven more by a case of Clinton Derangement Syndrome or are just really intense Trump fans. It’s probably a bit of both.
A series of tweets from a long-dormant F.B.I. Twitter account suggest an ulterior motive.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, while under the aegis of the Justice Department, is nominally an independent organization, allowing it to remain nonpartisan. This explains in part the outrage on the left (and by some on the right) when F.B.I. director James Comey sent a letter Friday notifying Congress that the agency had renewed its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private e‑mail server, a case it had closed months earlier. Comey was immediately derided for his decision to send the letter with so few specifics so close to the election, effectively raising all sorts of flags and changing the campaign dialogue without explanation. Senator Harry Reid wrote a letter of his own, arguing that Comey’s “partisan actions” may have violated federal law. He also made the point of asking why the F.B.I. director didn’t give similar treatment to what he called “explosive information” linking Trump and his campaign staff to the Russian government. Now, a new interagency mystery is raising questions about whether the F.B.I. has become politicized, just days before the presidential election. On Sunday, a long-dormant F.B.I. Twitter account suddenly sprung to life, blasting out a series of links to case files that cast the Clintons in a decidedly negative light. One tweet links to publicly available documents related to the agency’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private e‑mail server, followed immediately by another tweet linking to the investigation of former general David Petraeus for compromising classified material—a jarring juxtaposition given the allegations against Clinton. Then, on Tuesday, the “FBI Records Vault” account—which had not tweeted at all between October 2015 and Sunday—published a link to records related to the 15-year-old, long-closed investigation into former President Bill Clinton’s pardoning of onetime commodities trader turned fugitive Marc Rich. The post, which was quickly retweeted thousands of times, links to a heavily redacted document that repeatedly references the agency’s “Public Corruption” unit—less-than-ideal optics for Hillary Clinton, who has spent her entire campaign fighting her image as a corrupt politician.
5. As it happens, James Comey is a long-time tormenter of the Clintons, going back to the Whitewater investigation. Comey was also in charge of the investigations into Marc Rich and Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich.
Is there a connection between the official dismissal of the investigation into the Alfa/Trump link by the FBI, the tweeting by the FBI of the files on the Clinton pardon of Marc Rich and the fact that it was Comey who presided over the Marc Rich investigations?
” . . . . In 2002, Comey, then a federal prosecutor, took over an investigation into President Bill Clinton’s 2001 pardon of financier Marc Rich, who had been indicted on a laundry list of charges before fleeing the country. The decision set off a political firestorm focused on accusations that Rich’s ex-wife Denise made donations to the Democratic Party, the Clinton Library and Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign as part of a plan to get Rich off the hook. Comey ultimately decided not to pursue the case. The kicker: Comey himself had overseen Rich’s prosecution between 1987 and 1993. . . .”
. . . . . His first run-in came in the mid-1990s, when he joined the Senate Whitewater Committee as a deputy special counsel. There he dug into allegations that the Clintons took part in a fraud connected to a Arkansas real estate venture gone bust. No charges were ever brought against either Clinton, but the scandal would eventually lead to independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s probe that would result in the Lewinsky scandal.
In 2002, Comey, then a federal prosecutor, took over an investigation into President Bill Clinton’s 2001 pardon of financier Marc Rich, who had been indicted on a laundry list of charges before fleeing the country. The decision set off a political firestorm focused on accusations that Rich’s ex-wife Denise made donations to the Democratic Party, the Clinton Library and Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign as part of a plan to get Rich off the hook. Comey ultimately decided not to pursue the case.
The kicker: Comey himself had overseen Rich’s prosecution between 1987 and 1993. . . .
The Political Implications of the UFO Phenomenon and the "ET" Myth
The Daily Beast has a new piece up summarizing the list of figures in Donald Trump’s orbit with ties to Russia and it turns out one of those figures has a pretty direct connection to Alfa Bank: Richard Burt, a member of Alfa’s senior advisory council. He’s also a lobbyist for the Nord Stream II pipeline, which will send natural gas from Russia to Germany via the Baltic Sea, bypassing Ukraine and Belarus. So what’s Burt’s ties to the Trump campaign? Crafting Trump’s foreign policy:
“Burt was recruited by Paul Manafort to help the Trump campaign write a speech that tried to define his foreign-policy vision.. Burt has also repeatedly defended Trump’s foreign-policy ideas, including during periods of time when Trump was under attack for not having enough support from well-respected foreign-policy experts.enough support from well-respected foreign-policy experts”
So one of Alfa’s senior advisors is the guy behind Trump’s foreign policy vision. Oh, and he just happens to be lobbyist for a major Russian/German pipeline. A pipeline that is currently 100 percent owned by Gazprom, but was 50 owned by European investors until they all pulled out of the project in August after a Polish regulatory agency raised antitrust questions about the project. That’s an important point because while Burt’s ties to Russia are what everyone is focusing on, Richard Burt’s experience and ties aren’t limited to Russia and when he was lobbying for Nord Stream II before the recent pull out of it European partners he wasn’t just lobbying for Gazprom. He was lobbying for European giants like BASF, E.ON, ENGIE, OMV, and Shell too.
And since the Nord Stream II pipeline has Germany as its destination and major German energy companies as partners (at least until they pulled out recently), it’s also with noting that Burt was a former US ambassador to Germany:
“For his part, Burt, a former Reagan State Department official and U.S. ambassador to Germany, said he does not consider himself an adviser to the campaign and that he would provide Hillary Clinton with advice if asked. Burt said that while he has discussed Trump with Russian officials, his work for Nord Stream II has only involved contact with the project’s European staff in Zug, Switzerland. He said his firm, McLarty Associates – headed by former President Bill Clinton’s ex-chief of staff Mack McLarty – was referred the Nord Stream II work by a financial PR firm in New York.”
And note that the above article described his lobbying work as lobbying Washington DC, presumably because of US opposition to the pipeline, and that, until the recent pull out of European investors, the German government had been a staunch defender of the pipeline over growing criticism as tensions between the West and Russia grew and sanctions were put in place. All in all, it’s not hard to see why he was chosen to be a Russia-to-Germany natural gas pipeline lobbyist. Although technically he was actually ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany, since he was Reagan’s ambassador from 1985 to 1989, during the preliminary stages for German reunification
So one of the figures who shaped Donald Trump’s foreign policy vision is Reagan’s former ambassador to Germany who is currently a senior advisor to Alfa and a lobbyist for a Russia-to-Germany pipeline that, until recently, had major Germany energy companies as investors and backing by the Germany government. That all seems rather notable when assessing Donald Trump’s foreign influences.
http://www.tbagg.com/politics/newsmedia/trump-alfa-newspurge/trump-alfa-purge.html
With the incoming Trump administration successfully horrifying much of the world one cabinet position at a time, it’s probably worth recalling that implausibly poor judgement in vetting is a long-time Trump specialty:
“In every business, people slip through the cracks,” he said. “No matter how well-run a business, people come in and they’re not good, and you wonder, you know, how did they get there, et cetera.”
Yes, in every business, people slip through the cracks. And in Trump’s case those people are sons of notoriously corrupt foreign politicians, mobsters, and general grifters. Funny how that keeps happening. It’s almost as if Trump’s “word of mouth” vetting system has some flaws:
“We heard good things about him from a couple of different people...That’s true with the president of the United States. You get references and sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s not so good.”
That’s our Trump! When he vets the children of notoriously corrupt politicians who are widely seen as being front for their corrupt parents, the Trump team just sort of asks a couple of people. And explicitly do not ask about the corrupt parents:
Yep, that’s our Trump! The bold leader who will ‘Drain the swamp’ because he’s such a shrewd business man. And while it might be tempting to view Trump as a giant Chump when recounting the web of international corruption and organized crime figures that he apparently keeps ‘accidentally’ partnering with, let’s keep in mind that the only chumps in this situation are those that actually believe Trump really had no idea who he was partnering with in all these deals.
Let’s also keep in mind the content of FTR#570 and FTR#573 discussing role the figures affiliated with Alfa bank, one of whom was reportedly friends with Mohammed Atta, played in dirty dealings with Azerbaijan’s corrupt government. And note that the president of Azerbaijan at the time of those dealings, Heydar Aliyev, is the father of the current president Ilham Aliiyev, the administration Ziya Mammadov and his son Anar are extremely close to. That sure seems like a rock worth overturning!
Let’s also keep in mind that Trump’s vetting track record isn’t just a giant red flag about his cabinet picks and thousands of positions the administration is going to have to fill (quite possibly with neo-Nazis). Don’t forget that Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure investment proposal is actually a giant privatization scam where the government gives the private sector tax credits to be used for buying and owning up public infrastructure and running it for-profit. And that means the Trump administration is going to have to do a whole lot of vetting of exactly the kinds of shady international private developers that he’s been partnering with for decades. Uh oh:
“Again, all of these questions could be avoided by doing things the straightforward way: if you think we should build more infrastructure, then build more infrastructure, and never mind the complicated private equity/tax credits stuff. You could try to come up with some justification for the complexity of the scheme, but one simple answer would be that it’s not about investment, it’s about ripping off taxpayers. Is that implausible, given who we’re talking about?”
Gee, could it be that Trump’s big infrastructure investment plan is just a giant scam to tax payers that will be used to transfer tax-payer money and assets into the hands of Trump’s world of crony-capitalists? Hmmmmm....
It’s all a reminder that while much of the world is assuming Donald Trump is in Vladimir Putin’s pocket, when you look at Trump’s curiously ignorant dealings with a shady Azerbaijani oligarch and consider Trump’s close ties to figures associated with Alfa bank and Alfa’s shady history in Azerbaijan — and that’s just one example of Trump’s decades of shady dealings — it really doesn’t make sense to assume Donald Trump is in a single dictator’s pocket. He’s almost certainly in all sorts of pockets all over the world. Pockets that desire more lining. And if you think becoming President somehow gets Trump out of those shady pockets, just imagine how many other “Access Hollywood”-league audio or video tapes of Trump saying and doing horrible things that could severely embarrass him probably exist in shady hands all over the planet. Should we really believe that international playboy Trump, who was willing to brag about sexually assaulting women while on an Access Hollywood bus filled with the show’s staff, wasn’t getting secretly recorded by any of his shady/mobster partners saying all sorts of horrible things?
So as we see the Trump/GOP mass privatization plan take shape, keep in mind that vetting is going to be a critical issue unless you want the global mafia to own and operate the US’s formerly-public infrastructure as part of some giant scam.
And since this global nightmare situation could have easily been avoided at the ballot box, let’s also keep in mind that a national focus on the consequences of incompetent vetting shouldn’t be limited to Trump.
Uh oh, it looks like Donald Trump might be overdosing on Breitbart again. A flurry of tweets Saturday morning charge Barack Obama with approving of what Trump characterizes as a ‘Nixon/Watergate’-style wiretapping operation of the Trump Tower phones during the campaign. And while he cites no evidence for the charge, the tweets come a day after Breitbart published an article summarizing a rant by right-wing talk radio host Mark Levin making the exact same charge so that’s where everyone is assuming this came from:
“Trump offered no citations nor did he point to any credible news report to back up his accusation, but he may have been referring to commentary on Breitbart and conservative talk radio suggesting that Obama and his administration used “police state” tactics last fall to monitor the Trump team. The Breitbart story, published Friday, has been circulating among Trump’s senior staff, according to a White House official who described it as a useful catalogue of the Obama administration’s activities.”
Yep, if there was a wiretap approved on the Trump Tower campaign headquarter phones, it must be because the Obama administration was practicing ‘police state’ tactics. And not due to Trump being a walking national security risk who does things like publicly courting Russia to hack Hillary Clinton and has close associates like Roger Stone in open contact with Wikileaks. It could only be ‘Nixonian’ police state tactics. Tactics which were oddly not used to stop the highly public and damaging FBI investigations of Clinton. At least that’s how Trump and Breitbart see it.
So what’s going to come of Trump’s new charges? Well, first, note the language of Obama administration officials’ denials of the accusation: sources with knowledge of the federal investigations in possible Russian activities in the election say there had been no wiretap of Trump. And others familiar with surveillance law say they if there was wiretapping of the Trump campaign in relation to possible Russian collusion, it would have required a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) judge to approve it and that would have required probably cause to suspect that a foreign power was utilizing those Trump Tower phone lines or internet connections:
So is it just a distraction that’s going to fade away when the next Trump distraction or disaster comes along or could it be that there was a FISA warrant issued against Trump Tower’s phone lines or internet connection? Well, as the article below notes, there were actually reports of a FISA warrant opened against at least one internet-connected device in Trump Tower: the Trump Tower server mysteriously communicating with Alfa Bank:
“The Guardian and Heat Street have reported that the FBI applied for a foreign intelligence surveillance court (FISA) warrant over the summer to monitor four Trump staffers suspected of having improper ties to Russian officials. The initial request was turned down for being overly broad, but according to Heat Street, the FBI eventually received a warrant in October after the discovery of a server in Trump Tower connected to a Russian bank.”
So according to a report in Heat Street just before the election, the FBI did indeed grant a FISA warrant specifically related to the discovery of that Trump Tower server that was conspicuously communicating a Russian bank (Alfa Bank’s server). And as we’ll see below, that Heat Street article also notes that the Trump Tower server was apparently mysteriously communicating with SVB Bank server too (Silicon Valley Bank, a leading Silicon Valley bank specializing in funding tech start ups).
And not only that, but it was thought in the US intelligence community that the warrant would also cover any ‘US persons’ associated with the server, which could include Trump and three of his associates. Plus, according to the Heath Street article, the warrant was sought due to actionable intelligence provided by a friendly foreign intelligence service.
So who knows, maybe Trump is correct that Trump Tower phones lines were indeed getting wiretapped...due to his shady Trump Tower server and its shady communications with Alfa (and SVB) and actionable intelligence provided by a foreign intelligence service:
“The FISA warrant was granted in connection with the investigation of suspected activity between the server and two banks, SVB Bank and Alfa Bank. However, it is thought in the intelligence community that the warrant covers any ‘US person’ connected to this investigation, and thus covers Donald Trump and at least three further men who have either formed part of his campaign or acted as his media surrogates. The warrant was sought, they say, because actionable intelligence on the matter provided by friendly foreign agencies could not properly be examined without a warrant by US intelligence as it involves ‘US Persons’ who come under the remit of the FBI and not the CIA. Should a counter-intelligence investigation lead to criminal prosecutions, sources say, the Justice Department is concerned that the chain of evidence have a basis in a clear warrant.”
And note that, according to this Heat Street article, the report that had come out a week earlier that the FBI has concluded that the Alfa Bank server mystery was possibly just spam was NOT what the FBI investigators concluded:
So based on meta-data analysis the FBI concluded that the Trump Tower server was maybe possibly just sending spam to the Alfa Bank (and SVB) servers. But the the narrower FISA warrant was granted to examine the full content of emails and other related documents of the US persons involved. In other words, those reports that came out a week before the election that the FBI investigation the Trump-
Alfa connection and found nothing weren’t factoring in this additional FISA-empowered investigation byt the FBI’s counter-intelligence arm that allowed for emails and other documents to be examined.
So maybe Trump is right. Maybe the Trump Tower’s phones were tapped. Thanks to that shady Trump Tower server and some foreign intelligence. And while it’s possible Trump found out about this wiretapping from within the government, all indications are that he arrived at this conclusion based on that article in Breibart which was a summary of a rant by Mark Levin that was based exclusively on published articles. And this is a ‘McCarthyist’ and ‘Nixonian/Watergate’ scenario in Trump’s mind despite the fact that the Heat Street article describes a legal justification for the wiretapping if it took place.
Also note that the Breitbart article about Mark Levin’s radio show that laid out a case for investigating Barack Obama for using ‘police state’ tactics against the Trump campaign specifically references the above Heat Street article about the FISA warrant successfully opened by the FBI to investigate the Trump Tower server’s ties to Alpha Bank’s server (#4 in Levin’s list of evidence). So it’s very possible Trump is specifically freaking out about that article about how the FBI had a FISA warrant into the Alfa Bank and/or SVB Bank-related investigation when he was going on his twitter rampage.
It certainly raises the question of why he’s so freaked out. It also raises the possibility that Trump’s bombast and bluster may have acted as the opposite of a distraction and instead helped focus public attention on one of the most interesting possible aspects of the investigations into Trump’s foreign ties. Trump may have actually blustered himself from a bad situation into a worse one. In other words, if there is a ‘McCarthyist’ angle to all this it’s looking like a Melissa McCarthyist kind of angle.
Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly shared some thoughts on Donald Trump’s wiretapping accusations on Monday: Kelly is pretty sure Trump has some sort of evidence for his claims. And he also doesn’t believe the reports that FBI Director James Comey was incredulous over Trump’s tweets. So the head of DHS appears to believe Trump says and does things for good, valid reasons and not because he’s a dangerous lunatic: That doesn’t bode well:
“Kelly continued: “He must have some convincing evidence that took place. ... I don’t pretend to even guess as to what the motivation may have been for the previous administration to do something like that.””
Yes, according to the head of DHS, John Kelly, Trump must have some sort of convincing evidence. He simply must. Also, Kelly doesn’t trust those reports that FBI director James Comey was “incredulous” over Trump’s tweet due to a lack of sourcing:
That’s right, the head of DHS is pretty confident that Trump has “some convincing evidence” to back up his claims and also that the reports that James Comey wasn’t very pleased with Trump’s tweets were probably false.
So what does Comey actually think about all this? Well, aside from the reports that Kelly dismissed about Comey’s outrage over the tweets, there were the reports about what Comey told Trump. Which was nothing, according to the White House, since Trump hasn’t actually asked Comey if the alleged wiretapping took place:
““No, the President has not,” Spicer said.”
Well, that’s a bit awkward. For everyone involved. Including all US citizens. But, hey, there must be something that Trump was basing his tweetrage on other than that Breitbart article, right? Right?!:
“That’s how the idea reached Trump’s radar. The Breitbart article “circulated” in the West Wing, a White House official told CNN’s Jeff Zeleny, and the information “infuriated” Trump.”
So according to multiple right-wing sources, including White House sources, that Breitbart article was indeed the source of Trump’s original outrage. And he apparently hasn’t asked James Comey about it. So what about the fact that there are all these reports that Comey denies the wiretapping allegations? Does Trump share John Kelly’s suspicions that those reports are false? Well, according to a White House spokesperson, sort of. But it’s not so much that Trump is suspicious of the reports that Comey rejected the wiretapping claims. It’s that Trump doesn’t believe Comey reported denial that wiretapping never happened
“Asked by ABC “Good Morning America” host George Stephanopoulos if Trump was willing to accept the denial of his FBI director, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said he was not.”
To summarize, DHS chief John Kelly doesn’t know what evidence Trump has for his claims, but he’s pretty sure Trump has “some convincing evidence” and is also pretty sure that those reports about James Comey’s incredulous reaction to Trump tweets were false. Trump, on the other hand, appears to have based his tweets solely on the Breitbart article and doesn’t believe Comey’s reported wiretapping denials. And no one has actually asked Comey.
So what’s the plan from Team Trump? Are they just going to move forward with these charges and hope that Congressional investigations turn something. up? Yes, that does indeed appear to be the plan. Along with the hope that right-wing media outlets for basically turn Trump’s claims into “truth” through repetition and a strong desire by the GOP, with nearly unchecked power but no ability to govern responsibly, to keep Barack Obama as a permanent right-wing boogeyman:
“More mainstream sites have also stoked theories that Obama was pulling strings. Last Wednesday, the Daily Mail published an interview with an unnamed “close family friend,” who claimed that former White House adviser Valerie Jarrett had moved into Obama’s Kalorama home to help “mastermind the insurgency” against Trump.”
Yep, Barack Obama is an evil mastermind currently plotting to lead “the insurgency” to destroy Donald Trump and must be investigated by Congress. Pushing that meme is the plan. And the more people ask the Trump administration for evidence of its claims, the more pushing that meme is going to be the plan. And considering that the heads of the intelligence committees in both the House and Senate agreed to investigate Trump’s claims, it would appear everything is going according to plan. At least so far.
It’s all something to keep in mind when John Kelly says Trump has “got his reasons” for acting like an unhinged lunatic over the mystery of the Alfa Bank FISA warrant and wiretap and constantly pushing this “Obama is out to get me!” meme despite a complete lack of evidence and an unwillingness to even talk to the director of the FBI about it. They may not be good reasons, but Trump and the rest of the far-right has them.
Donald Trump had an interesting message to FBI Director James Comey during a recent interview on the Fox Business Network: When asked if it was too late for Trump to fire Comey, Trump relied “No, it’s not too late...But you know I have confidence in him. We’ll see what happens. It’s going to be interesting.” Yep, it’s going to be interesting. Not that the FBI’s strange position of investigating the President that the FBI tried like hell to put in place wasn’t already interesting. It’s just more interesting now that Trump issued that barely veiled threat to Comey:
“Trump said he wanted to “give everyone a good, fair chance,” but also argued that Comey had “saved” his Democratic presidential opponent Hillary Clinton by not recommending any criminal charges related to her use of a private email server as secretary of state.”
In the same interview where Trump issues a “We’ll see...” threat to Comey’s job he later suggests that Comey “saved” Hillary Clinton. Save her by not recommending criminal charges in the investigation of her private email server. An investigating that was always a bad partisan joke. So, yes, one of the examples of Trump’s dissatisfaction with Comey was how Comey didn’t recommend charges in a highly partisan investigation of a high level politician. And yes, he said this just weeks after we learn that the FBI had opened an investigation of the Trump campaign back in July, but never revealed it to the public (while be very open about the investigations into Hillary’s email server). And that investigation is ongoing:
“But, Comey said, just because the probe has been ongoing since July doesn’t mean it’s close to wrapping up.”
So Trump’s “we’ll see...” threat to Comey is taking place while the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia is still ongoing. Some might consider that conspicuous behavior. Although perhaps not as conspicuous as the behavior of the actual Trump team official who managed to get a FISA warrant issued to investigate his possible ties to Moscow, which is another fun fact we learned shortly before Trump did that “we’ll see...” interview:
“The oddity of Page is that he certainly wasn’t operating under deep cover. Indeed, he paraded his pro-Russian views widely. In other words, it’s not like Page was a mole — the most Russophobic advisor who turned out to be in Moscow’s employ. Page was right out in the open as a major critic of US policy who believed and said to all who’d listen that the US should be far friendlier to Russia. Other oddities are his constant press appearances. Why did he go on Chris Hayes show a few weeks ago? Why has he made so many press appearances, almost all of which have been handled weirdly and badly? Why hasn’t he just lawyered up and shut up? For that matter, if Page was operating as a Russian agent, why would he travel to Moscow to give a speech harshly critical of the US a week before the convention? Needless to say, that’s certainly going to draw attention. It’s all a mystery.”
Yep, if Carter Page was a Russian agent he was a very conspicuous Russian agent whose primary purpose for the Trump campaign appeared to be to look conspicuously like a Russian agent. As Josh Marshall puts it, it’s all a mystery. Worst. Agent. Ever. Unless conspicuously seeming like a Russian agent was his goal in which case he did a pretty good job.
So Trump issues a public threat to Comey’s job right after we learn about this FISA warrant that was issued for Carter Page as part of an investigation that was opened back in July. And while the timing of this does seem incredibly conspicuous and makes it seem like Trump is worried about where the investigation into Carter Page is going, let’s not forget that the investigation of Page isn’t the only aspect of the FBI’s investigation of possible foreign collusion with the Trump campaign that we also know is ongoing: the Trump server’s mysterious communications with Alfa bank. And based on this update from last month on where that investigation is heading, it sounds like investigators still have more questions than answers about that sever mystery. In part because the stories keep changing. For instance, now we’re learning that the Trump team is no longer claiming that the emails were actually sent by a third party contractor, Cendyn, to send Trump’s email spam. Why? Because the Trump team is now saying that it switched contractors back in March of 2016 to Serenata, a German contractor, and all these mystery communications between the Trump server and the Alfa server took place later in the year. In addition, Serenata acknowledges it hired by Trump Hotels, but says it “never has operated or made use of” the domain in question: mail1.trump-email.com. And that’s the domain that Alfa’s server kept looking up over and over and over. So that’s pretty interesting. Interestingly mysterious:
“Upon hearing that Cendyn gave up control of the Trump email domain, Camp, said: “That does not make any sense to me at all. The more confusing this is, the more I think we need an investigation.””
Yep, the multiple stories the Trump team was using to explain the Trump/Alfa server mystery have completely collapsed, in part because the stories keep changing:
“On Wednesday, Cendyn provided another explanation to CNN. Cendyn claims the Trump Hotel Collection ditched Cendyn and went with another email marketing company, the German firm Serenata, in March 2016. Cendyn said it “transferred back to” Trump’s company the mail1.trump-email.com domain.”
So after all the prior explanations failed to pan out, Cendyn suddenly seems to recall that it it was no longer the company Trump contracted to send its spam emails during the period in question because Trump Hotels hired a German firm to do that work instead. And yet the company that Cendyn suddenly remembers transferring the mail1.trump-email.com domain to, Serenata, claims it “never has operated or made use of” that domain. Yeah, that’s interesting.
And note this fun fact:
“Spectrum is a medical facility chain led by Dick DeVos, the husband of Betsy DeVos, who was appointed by Trump as U.S. education secretary.”
Spectrum Health is owned by *drumroll* the DeVos clan! Yowza.
And don’t forget, the FBI’s investigation into this whole thing remains open:
Also recall that it was the investigation of that Trump-contracted server that Trump based his entire “the Obama administration wiretapped Trump Tower! This is worse than Watergate!” hysterics. .
So while it’s possible Trump’s public threat against James Comey was primarily due to anxiety over the recent reports about a FISA warrant being issued against Carter Page (reports which suggest that there was strong evidence Page might be working for a foreign power), let’s keep in mind that when it comes to conspicuous behavior it’s hard to get more conspicuous than Trump has been acting around that Alfa server story. And it’s still an open FBI investigation.
Hopefully it gets some extra FBI investigating now that Trump publicly threatened Comey’s job.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4432052/3‑killed-shooting-Russian-intelligence-agencys-office.html#ixzz4ewSqEGmY
Teenage Neo-Nazi gunman storms Russian intelligence agency killing two people before being shot dead
By Darren Boyle for MailOnline
PUBLISHED: 06:14 EDT, 21 April 2017 | UPDATED: 12:23 EDT, 21 April 2017
- One FSB agent and a civilian were killed in the shooting in Khabarovsk, Russia
— Police believe a teenage neo-Nazi was responsible for today’s fatal attack
— One person was wounded and the gunman was also shot dead during the attack
— The man opened fire at officials as he approached a metal detector
Russia’s FSB intelligence agency says three people were killed — including the attacker — and one wounded in an armed attack at its office in the Far East.
The FSB, the main successor to the KGB, said in a statement on Friday that an unidentified man passed by metal detectors, entered the reception area of the FSB’s office in Khabarovsk and opened fire at the people who were there.
One FSB officer and one visitor were killed on spot and one was wounded. Security shot dead the attacker.
An attacker opened fire at the FSB’s headquarters building in Khabarovsk, eastern Russia.
The FSB would not immediately release any details about the shooter.
Social media users posted pictures of police cordons around the FSB building in Khabarovsk with special forces standing by.
According to the Tass news agency: ‘At 17:02 local time (06:02 GMT), an unidentified man entered the FSB receiving office and opened fire before crossing the control zone.’
One FSB officer and a civilian were killed, while another visitor suffered gunshot wounds.
The gunman, who has been identified as A.V. Konev, is believed to be 18.
A spokesman said: ‘Some information points to his being a member of a neo-Nazi group.’
Deadly attacks on Russian law enforcement officials are rare outside the country’s volatile North Caucasus region.
The country has seen significant support for far-right groups that have sparked brutal confrontations with immigrants from the former Soviet region.
Despite stoking nationalist sentiment since the seizure of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, the authorities under President Vladimir Putin have also cracked down on neo-Nazi extremists.
The country has been on heightened alert since an alleged suicide bomb attack on the metro in the second city of Saint Petersburg on April 3 left 15 people dead.