Friday, October 01, 2021

NYT unmasks researchers who discovered Trump computers talking to Russian bank in 2016
Bob Brigham
September 30, 2021

US President Donald Trump (right) and Russia's President Vladimir Putin talk during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders' summit in the central Vietnamese city of Danang on November 11, 2017 (AFP Photo/JORGE SILVA)

One of the largest unanswered questions about former President Donald Trump and Russia came into sharper focus on Thursday after The New York Times published a bombshell new report by Charlie Savage and Adam Goldman.

The story focused on the mystery of Trump Organization computer servers communicating with "Kremlin-linked" Alfa Bank in Russia.

Interest in the case has grown since special counsel John Durham indicted Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann for allegedly lying to the FBI when he came forward to alert them to the unusual traffic.

On Thursday, CNN reported Durham had issued new subpoenas in the case and noted it was "an indication that Durham could be trying to build a broader criminal case, according to people briefed on the matter."

The researchers who uncovered the traffic were not identified by Durham in the indictment, but were unmasked by The Times.

"Originator-1" is April Lorenzen, the chief data scientist at Zetalytics. "Researcher-1" is Georgia Tech computer scientist Manos Antonakakis. "Researcher-2" is David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist.

The researchers are standing by their findings.

Dagon's lawyer told the newspaper the results "have been validated and are reproducible. The findings of the researchers were true then and remain true today; reports that these findings were innocuous or a hoax are simply wrong."

The newspaper noted what was going on remains a mystery.

"The F.B.I., which had already started its Trump-Russia investigation before it heard about the possible Trump-Alfa connections, quickly dismissed the suspicions, apparently concluding the interactions were probably caused by marketing emails sent by an outside firm using a domain registered to the Trump Organization," the newspaper reported. "A 2018 analysis commissioned by the Senate, made public this month, detailed technical reasons to doubt that marketing emails were the cause."

And the report noted the Alfa Bank server traffic was not the only thing discovered and taken to the federal government.

"Their other set of concerns centered on data suggesting that a YotaPhone — a Russian-made smartphone rarely seen in the United States — had been used from networks serving the White House, Trump Tower and Spectrum Health, a Michigan hospital company whose server had also interacted with the Trump server," the newspaper reported. "Mr. Sussmann relayed their YotaPhone findings to counterintelligence officials at the C.I.A. in February 2017, the people said. It is not clear whether the government ever investigated them."

The newspaper also reported on how the Pentagon helped discover the traffic.

"The involvement of the researchers traces back to the spring of 2016. Darpa, the Pentagon's research funding agency, wanted to commission data scientists to develop the use of so-called DNS logs, records of when servers have prepared to communicate with other servers over the internet, as a tool for hacking investigations," the newspaper reported. "Darpa identified Georgia Tech as a potential recipient of funding and encouraged researchers there to develop examples."

While sifting through the data, Lorenzen "noticed an odd pattern: a server called mail1.trump-email.com appeared to be communicating almost exclusively with servers at Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health."


Trump's Russia special counsel John Durham is misrepresenting mysterious Trump-Russia link, researchers say


Peter Weber, Senior editor
Fri, October 1, 2021, 12:24 

John Dunham U.S. Attorney's Office, District of Connecticut, 
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

One of the many subplots of the 2016 election was the mystery of whether Russia's Alfa Bank was secretly communicating with a server in Trump Tower, an apparent connection uncovered by four computer researchers who passed on their data to the FBI in September 2016. Five years later, "the data remains a mystery," The New York Times reports, but Special Counsel John Durham, appointed under former President Donald Trump to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, cast doubt on the researchers and their analysis in an indictment he handed down in mid-September.

The data researchers hit back Thursday, saying that despite misleading, cherry-picked snippets of their emails that Durham included in his 27-page indictment of cybersecurity lawyer Michael Sussmann, they stand by their analysis that Alfa Bank and Trump's company were communicating and trying to hide it, their lawyers told the Times and CNN.

Sussmann, then working at the firm Perkins Coie, brought the findings from the four researchers to the FBI in September 2016. At the time, his clients included both Hillary Clinton's campaign and Rodney Joffe, an internet entrepreneur and one of the four data researchers. Durham's grand jury indicted Sussmann on one count of lying to the FBI for allegedly omitting his ties to the Clinton campaign. Sussmann says he was only representing Joffe at the meeting and denies lying to the FBI.

It isn't clear why Durham, whose investigation is shrouded in secrecy, included the long sections on the Alfa Bank research in his Sussmann indictment. But "more than two years after being commissioned by then Attorney General William Barr to investigate whether federal authorities improperly targeted the Trump campaign, Durham has little to show for his efforts," CNN recaps. "His special counsel probe, which has lasted longer than Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, has so far brought only two lying charges against little-known figures, including the case against Sussmann, who has pleaded not guilty."

Since indicting Sussmann, Durham has subpoenaed more information from Perkins Coie, CNN and the Times report.

The Sussmann case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Christopher "Casey" Cooper in Washington, D.C. Cooper "will likely weigh during court proceedings before a trial whether Sussmann disclosing his client to the FBI mattered," CNN reports. "If Cooper allows the case to move forward, he could kick that question to a trial jury."

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