This has been a busy week, I am in the middle of a heavy travel schedule and have also been just in shock watching the “President” show the entire world how fundamentally unfit for the the job he is. If the last two weeks have not convinced you how totally worthless one Donald J. Trump is – as both an elected leader and as a human being, then your soul is dead. And you heart is either non-existent or a black as a mine shaft.
There will be time to dissect the totally lack of empathy shown yet again by the Orange Monster in the days to come this week. But for now, I just want to draw your attention to an recent article in the New Yorker Magazine. I read it on the plane returning from the land of milk and honey last week. It’s a fascinating read – and harbinger ( I hope) of the long list of corruption that Mueller will unveil for us in the coming weeks.
The article is about a group of computer scientists who have been doing forensics on a large amount of unsual activity that was conducted between Russian banks and the Trump campaign during the 2016 Campaign.
In June, 2016, after news broke that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked, a group of prominent computer scientists went on alert. Reports said that the infiltrators were probably Russian, which suggested to most members of the group that one of the country’s intelligence agencies had been involved. They speculated that if the Russians were hacking the Democrats they must be hacking the Republicans, too. “We thought there was no way in the world the Russians would just attack the Democrats,” one of the computer scientists, who asked to be identified only as Max, told me.
The group was small—a handful of scientists, scattered across the country—and politically diverse. (Max described himself as “a John McCain Republican.”) Its members sometimes worked with law enforcement or for private clients, but mostly they acted as self-appointed guardians of the Internet, trying to thwart hackers and to keep the system clean of malware—software that hackers use to control a computer remotely, or to extract data. “People think the Internet runs on its own,” Max told me. “It doesn’t. We do this to keep the Internet safe.” The hack of the D.N.C. seemed like a pernicious attack on the integrity of the Web, as well as on the American political system. The scientists decided to investigate whether any Republicans had been hacked, too. “We were trying to protect them,” Max said.
The article goes
Examining records for the Trump domain, Max’s group discovered D.N.S. lookups from a pair of servers owned by Alfa Bank, one of the largest banks in Russia. Alfa Bank’s computers were looking up the address of the Trump server nearly every day. There were dozens of lookups on some days and far fewer on others, but the total number was notable: between May and September, Alfa Bank looked up the Trump Organization’s domain more than two thousand times. “We were watching this happen in real time—it was like watching an airplane fly by,” Max said. “And we thought, Why the hell is a Russian bank communicating with a server that belongs to the Trump Organization, and at such a rate?”
Only one other entity seemed to be reaching out to the Trump Organization’s domain with any frequency: Spectrum Health, of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Spectrum Health is closely linked to the DeVos family; Richard DeVos, Jr., is the chairman of the board, and one of its hospitals is named after his mother. His wife, Betsy DeVos, was appointed Secretary of Education by Donald Trump. Her brother, Erik Prince, is a Trump associate who has attracted the scrutiny of Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trump’s ties to Russia. Mueller has been looking into Prince’s meeting, following the election, with a Russian official in the Seychelles, at which he reportedly discussed setting up a back channel between Trump and the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. (Prince maintains that the meeting was “incidental.”) In the summer of 2016, Max and the others weren’t aware of any of this. “We didn’t know who DeVos was,” Max said.
While it was clear that those involved were trying for secrecy a handful of news organizations got wind of the story. In August “Max” met with the New York Times, very concerned about this evidence they had found. “If the covert communications were real, this potential threat to our country needed to be known before the election,” he said.
The article is worth your time to read. It is a long article, but it’s well researched. It asks the questions that should be asked, primarily, why the activity declined and then ceased, once the stories started coming out.
If Trump and Alfa Bank—as well as Spectrum Health and Heartland Payment Systems—were communicating, what might they have been talking about? Max and some of the other scientists I spoke to theorized that they may have been using the system to signal one another about events or tasks that had to be performed: money to be transferred, for instance, or data to be copied. “My guess is that, whenever someone wanted to talk, they would do a D.N.S. lookup and then route the traffic somewhere else,” Richard Clayton, of the Universityof Cambridge, said. Camp also speculated that the system may have been used to coördinate the movement of data. She noted that Cambridge Analytica, which was working for the Trump campaign, took millions of personal records from Facebook. In Camp’s scenario, these could have been transferred to the Russian government, to help guide its targeting of American voters before the election.
The article correctly points out that not all of the details have yet to become public, but there is enough evidence to make you wonder what exactly the Trump campaign was up to. And it is yet another reminder of just how much of aberration from accepted American norms of conduct, this disgusting excuse for a Presidential administration really is.