Cyber War

The Kremlin candidate, Donald Trump, may very well be ‘Putin’s puppet’

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trump-putin_website-800x430Putin pal Donald Trump may very well be “Putin’s puppet,” the Manchurian Kremlin candidate, according to a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence. Mother Jones reports, A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump:

On Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid . . . sent FBI Director James Comey a fiery letter saying the FBI chief may have broken the law and pointed to a potentially greater controversy: “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government…The public has a right to know this information.”

Reid’s missive set off a burst of speculation on Twitter and elsewhere. What was he referring to regarding the Republican presidential nominee? At the end of August, Reid had written to Comey and demanded an investigation of the “connections between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign,” and in that letter he indirectly referred to Carter Page, an American businessman cited by Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers, who had financial ties to Russia and had recently visited Moscow. Last month, Yahoo News reported that US intelligence officials were probing the links between Page and senior Russian officials.

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The computer server that the media should be fixated on

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Putin-Trump-KissThe New York Times today soft-pedals the FBI investigation into the Kremlin candidate, Putin Pal Donald Trump, and members of his campaign staff’s connections to Russian oligarchs.

Buried deep in the Times report, Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia, is this passage:

In classified sessions in August and September, intelligence officials also briefed congressional leaders on the possibility of financial ties between Russians and people connected to Mr. Trump. They focused particular attention on what cyberexperts said appeared to be a mysterious computer back channel between the Trump Organization and the Alfa Bank, which is one of Russia’s biggest banks and whose owners have longstanding ties to Mr. Putin.

F.B.I. officials spent weeks examining computer data showing an odd stream of activity to a Trump Organization server and Alfa Bank. Computer logs obtained by The New York Times show that two servers at Alfa Bank sent more than 2,700 “look-up” messages — a first step for one system’s computers to talk to another — to a Trump-connected server beginning in the spring. But the F.B.I. ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts.

Anyone reading this abbreviated passage would be led to believe that this Trump computer server talking to Russian servers was no big deal.

That is until you read the lengthy and deeply detailed reporting of Franklin Foer at Slate, who interviewed the cyber experts who actually did the analysis and not just rely on what the FBI says,  like the Times reporters. Foer’s reporting raises serious questions about what is going on between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank. This is the computer server that the media should be fixated on.

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