Pages with tag Trump Campaign

Atty General Barr clears Trump of collusion because of single charge against Wikileaks founder Assange Last weeks arrest of Julian Assange is playing a strange role in US Attorney General William Barr's decision around whether the Trump Campaign is guilty of conspiracy with Wikileaks to damage the Clinton Campaign by releasing stolen emails. The USA has charged Assange with a single count from 10 years ago of aiding Bradley Manning (now known as Chelsea Manning) break into top secret computers to steal documents that were then released by Wikileaks. The line of reasoning behind the single charge for Assange is also crucial in saying the Trump Campaign did no wrong, in Barr's eyes.
Revisiting the Trump server communications with Russia's Alpha Bank

Today New Yorker magazine posted a long article revisiting a semi-obscure detail in the Trump-Russia-Conspiracy story. Late in the 2016 election cycle news broke that Trump Campaign servers had been communicating through an arcane channel with servers owned by Alpha Bank. Alpha Bank is closely connected to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his cronies, and has been tied to Russian Oligarch money laundering activities. This communication is regularly referenced as part of the curious connections between the Trump Campaign and Putin cronies.

A year ago this site ran a story looking into the details, and finding it inconclusive. The story is based on studies of DNS query traffic, and not of actual traffic. A DNS query is made whenever software needs the IP address for a remote computer. The source for the story seemingly had access to query logs for a set of prominent DNS servers, but because they cannot have had query logs for all DNS servers any report they made would be limited. They claimed to have seen a curious pattern of DNS queries between a set of servers owned by Alpha Bank, the Trump Organization, and Spectrum Health (a company connected to the DeVos family).

The new article covers the same territory, and claims to have studied the issue more closely.
Was a Trump server communicating with Russia's Alpha Bank?

Late in the 2016 election, news broke that Trump Campaign servers had been communicating through an arcane channel with servers owned by Alpha Bank. Alpha Bank is closely connected to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his cronies, and has been tied to Russian Oligarch money laundering activities. The news came amid other allegations of collusion between Trump and the Russians, and is routinely mentioned by Journalists like Rachel Maddow as part of the rationale for the Trump-Russia-Collusion story.

The news broke in a Slate article that detailed work by a group of Internet Security researchers. The article discusses some kind of database of DNS records that somehow describe the architecture of a set of Internet services that somehow describe a pattern of communication between Trump's organization and Alpha Bank. Reading between the lines of the article, the data source has to be someone with access to primary DNS servers who can gather logs of DNS queries.

Wikileaks and Assange stopped being Hero's, became political hacks, according to Mueller Report Within the released and redacted Mueller Report is details of Julian Assange's efforts to ensure Wikileaks played a partisan role in the US Election of 2016. Wikileaks portrays itself as a journalistic organization, but Assange's effort to play a role in ensuring Clinton lost is not the action of a journalist. Journalists do not pick sides, but report events. Some wish us to see Assange as some kind of hero of the people. Perhaps Assange and Wikileaks used to play a positive hero-of-the-people role, but taking sides in political contests has destroyed that image of Wikileaks.
Wikileaks founder Assange arrested, not charged in leaking Clinton emails during 2016 campaign The USA is extraditing Julian Assange from British custody after he was arrested today on an outstanding warrant from 2012. Assange has not been charged with his alleged involvement in the conspiracy to interfere with the 2016 elections, but has curiously been charged with a single count from 2010.
Wikileaks founder Assange faces Espionage charges, but nothing on his role in Trump-Russia conspiracy In April, Julian Assange was arrested in London, and the USA immediately filed for extradition over one count of assisting in the computer hacking in 2010 that lead to the release of leaked documents. When Assange assisted in the hacking to acquire those documents, he stepped over a line. Today the USA Dept of Justice filed additional counts against Assange related to the 2010 leak, but the Dept did not file any indictment related to Assange's role in the conspiracy between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government to release Clinton e-mails during the 2016 campaign.