The DNC had several meetings with representatives of the FBI’s Cyber Division and. Yet the long-awaited Senate report provides only this paltry, ambiguous conclusion:The DNC told Buzzfeed News that they did not receive a request from the FBI to access their computer servers. The report, however, started to cause more questions to be asked than were answered.It has been almost four years since a group of computer scientists disclosed, on the basis of DNS (Domain Name System) logs, that two internet servers belonging to Alfa Bank had looked up the address of the Trump Organization server 2,820 times between May and September 2016. In it they fingered the Kremlin as the party behind the hacks.
Was the committee told what kind of technical diligence the FBI carried out, or whether the FBI used the talent of cyber experts such as those at Carnegie Mellon University, the CIA and NSA?Amazingly, the committee may have interviewed only one source–Jae Cho, the IT director for the Trump Organization, who “did not recall conducting a system-wide review of the Trump Organization network to determine if there were any connections from the Trump Organization side with any of the Alfa Bank servers.” According to the report, Cho “inferred” that Alfa Bank’s servers were configured in a way that they could not have been used to transmit emails to the Trump server. So, although committee members have high-level security clearances, they appear to remain in the dark about the reasons for the server communications. However, the Committee also could not positively determine an intent or purpose that would explain the unusual activity.”As stated on page 24 of the Senate report, the committee was not able to see the underlying records that the FBI used in its briefings to members.
But an FBI official subsequently told Lichtblau “that there could be an innocuous explanation for the computer traffic.” So when his story finally appeared on Oct. According to Filkins, later that month the agency persuaded the New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau to back off a story the paper planned to publish on the case because it would jeopardize the agency’s ongoing investigation. It has never been suggested that Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization shared domain names.Mixed Messages from the Department of JusticeThe FBI has been obfuscating about the Trump/Alfa server links ever since a lawyer for the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Michael Sussmann, told FBI General Counsel James Baker in mid-September 2016 about the findings of the computer scientists who had examined the data, and intelligence officials reportedly began briefing Congress about the mysterious connections around the same time. Claiming that he forgot the name of the bank involved, Parscale dismissed the server incident with a nonsensical statement: “Trump Org had done something on a server that for some service Cendyn was the provider of…And this other organization also used the same company for something else and they just happened to have the same DNS entry, which is very common.” The DNS queries were from dedicated IP addresses owned by Alfa Bank, not by a hosting company sharing IP addresses. Writing in the New Yorker in 2018, Dexter Filkins noted that computer scientists who examined the data theorized that the look-ups could have represented other forms of communication, such as data transfers or a technique called foldering (a digital form of “dead dropping”).Brad Parscale, the digital media director for Trump’s 2016 campaign, was even less helpful when questioned by the House Intelligence Committee in October 2017.
Fbi Asked For Dnc Server Full Cooperation With
That said, Dinh described the meeting as Alfa Bank proactively reaching out to the government due to suspicious activity in 2017 involving unidentified third parties repeatedly querying the bank’s servers for an invalid host name related to Trump. And on April 1, 2017, a Kirkland & Ellis attorney representing Alfa Bank, Viet Dinh, met with the Justice Department and FBI in Chicago to discuss the server communications and “pledged full cooperation with government authorities,” according to a letter Dinh sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee. In March 2017, a source close to the investigation told CNN that the probe was ongoing and there was more work for the FBI to do. But, the FBI’s investigation apparently did not end in early February 2017. A footnote on page 119 reads: “The FBI investigated whether there were cyber links between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, but concluded by early February 2017 that there were no such links.”Though terse, those words could have helped put the issue to rest. Was he constrained in his investigation or what he could say by Attorney General William Barr or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, or had his team for other reasons decided not to reach, whether privately or publicly, a more decisive conclusion?The only other information on the case from the Department of Justice appeared in the December 2019 Inspector General’s report about the origins of the Russia investigation.
Van der Zwaan’s father-in-law is one of Alfa Bank’s co-owners, German Khan, and the law firm has represented Alfa Bank in numerous litigations over the years.Alfa Bank’s complaint makes the erroneous claim that in October 2016 the FBI was granted a FISA warrant to wiretap the Trump server, citing two sources: Louise Mensch, a known purveyor of conspiracy theories, and the December IG report, which discusses only warrants granted in relation to Carter Page.As evidence for its conspiracy allegations, the complaint cites an April 2020 study by the cybersecurity firm Ankura. Dinh wrote in 2017 that the company hired Mandiant and that “Mandiant’s hypothesis was that any server-related activity between Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization was the result of an automated email-based campaign to market Trump properties to Alfa Bank employees.” So which is it? That innocuous account that Alfa Bank put forth earlier or the new nefarious one?Demanding jury trials in the two swing states, Alfa Bank’s lawyers from Skadden Arps have issued aggressive subpoenas in the Florida case to computer scientists and DNS records custodians, as well as to Glenn Simpson, Peter Fritch and their firm Fusion GPS, which commissioned the Steele dossier, and former DNC lawyer Sussmann.It is noteworthy that Skadden formerly employed Alex van der Zwaan, who was convicted in 2018 of lying to Mueller’s prosecutors about his communications with Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and Russian military intelligence (GRU) spy Konstantin Kilimnik during the 2016 election campaign.
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