Does anyone recall the Alfa Bank/Trump server story? Among all the false allegations of Russian collusion, perhaps none had so little public impact as Slate’s October 31, 2016 report of a possible cyber “backchannel” between then-candidate Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Four years later, however, the littlest scandal might resurface to expose the fatal flaw in the wider plot against the president.
According to last week’s New Yorker article by Dexter Filkins, Special Counsel John Durham has recently subpoenaed multiple sources quoted in Filkins’ 2018 report on the server saga. Filkins writes that Durham’s recent subpoenas are for testimony before a grand jury: “Some agents told scientists that they were exploring a potential criminal charge . . . for giving false information to the government.” (Emphasis added.)
The evidence below—which I believe has not been published elsewhere, though it has long been open-source—makes a strong case for the veracity of Filkins’ sources. It suggests that false information about a Trump-Alfa-Putin backchannel was indeed passed to the FBI.
Frankly, I am not aware of a simpler, more persuasive piece of evidence that shows “Russian collusion” was entirely and intentionally false. Indeed, it was the largest criminal abuse of power in American history.
Alfa Bank is the largest private commercial bank in Russia. According to the original Slate story, from May 5, 2016 until late September of 2016, an Alfa Bank server performed 2,820 DNS lookups of a server operated by a marketing firm contracted by the Trump Organization. Slate quoted several DNS and cybersecurity experts. To varying degrees, each supported the article’s thesis: That the DNS lookups appeared to show a covert backchannel between Trump and Vladimir Putin through a Russian cutout…
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