New evidence of fabrications behind the Trump-Russia theory

https://mate.substack.com/p/with-clinton-lawyer-charged-the-russiagate

by cnst • 5 years ago

87 64 5 years ago

mate.substack.com

oh_sigh• 5 years ago

The theory of a purported covert Trump-Alfa channel had been cooked up by an unnamed tech executive positioning himself for a top cybersecurity job in the anticipated Clinton administration.

Presumably Eric Schmidt?

hlieberman• 5 years ago

The indictment itself specifies that nothing Michael Sussmann said was false, merely that he misrepresented on who's behalf he was sending it. No amount of spin will turn this into "Russia didn't interfere with the US election to elect Trump, potentially with the assistance of his own staff"

sorethescore2• 5 years ago

It's also not clear that he was working on behalf of anyone, although I can see how some might be inclined to assume as much.

sorethescore2• 5 years ago

I'm confused which claim is factually incorrect, that there was a connection between the Trump Campaign and Russia's Alfa Bank. Or that the Attorney who provided that information to the FBI was was not working "for any client," and was simply passing on information that had been provided to him by "multiple cyber experts" who had come across the suspicious web traffic.

mikeyouse• 5 years ago

Aaron Mate is a hack.. much smarter people have covered the Sussman charges extensively and objectively:

https://www.emptywheel.net/2021/09/22/john-durham-is-the-jim...

Or if you'd prefer a more technical discussion, Krebs has a nice update;

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/09/lawsuits-indictments-rev...

ttyprintk• 5 years ago

HN on the Krebs article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28629227

You might move the discussion there and away from this one.

Multiplayer• 5 years ago

Why is this on Hacker News?

dang6• 5 years ago

HN has always had space for some political stories—the ones that overlap with intellectual interest. This one arguably does. Whether HN is capable of discussing it substantively is a separate issue.

Many past explanations here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

onetrueliberal• 5 years ago

Is disinformation fractal in nature? Is there ever a purpose to discussing it, or is the discussion the purpose?

lvs3• 5 years ago

"Intellectual interest" is a new one. You are once again letting too much snake oil promulgate through this service. You have a responsibility here to do a better job that you're shirking on the thinnest of excuses.

smt882• 5 years ago

This predictably turned into a flamewar. I didn't learn anything new, and it doesn't seem like anyone else did, either. I don't think this community does pure politics well, and I also think that's fine. No forum (IRL or digital) does.

dredmorbius2• 5 years ago

I'm not sure if this subission was entered into the second-chance queue before or after this comment, but HN did put its thumb on the scale here, as it does from time to time.

(Disclaimer: I've both benefitted from that in the past and nominated other items for the queue.)

"Whether HN is capable of discussing it substantively is a separate issue." Indeed...

spamizbad• 5 years ago

Did the Trump/Russia thing actually matter? The whole thing just seemed like a clickbait scam for liberals who - let's be honest - were always going to vote against Trump.

It sounds like swing voters didn't really care about Trump's scandals - they perhaps were just frustrated with his conduct and handling of the pandemic and ensuing social unrest.

WoahNoun11• 5 years ago

Yes it matters. It was an attack on our democracy and national security by an aggressive foreign adversary.

aaomidi2• 5 years ago

~Lmao, the indictment is specifically that Russiagate was fabricated and there was a huge conspiracy lying about it.~

This was misleading due to me misunderstanding and my own biases.

happytoexplain2• 5 years ago

It sounds like swing voters didn't really care about Trump's scandals

Really? My impression was that they were the only ones who cared (in the sense that they could make a decision one way or the other, as opposed to being fated to a decision by one's sociopolitical loyalties/hatreds).

risk• 5 years ago

i flagged this shitpost. how did it get 37 points?

blunte2• 5 years ago

Is it possible that troll farms are slowly building up HN accounts which they can use to push something to the front page?

dang6• 5 years ago

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28647191 and don't post like this again. If you have evidence (by which I mean any shred of anything objective), please email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look into it.

lvs3• 5 years ago

I agree with both of you. That this kind of political drivel is increasingly gaining traction here is strange.

BigToach• 5 years ago

Podcast breaking down what this indictment is. Starts around the 50s point.

https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/lrc-presents-all-the-preside...

WoahNoun11• 5 years ago

You can see an example of the DNS logs collected on page 803 of the Senate Intelligence report rather than reading blog. Clearly the Alfa bank did DNS lookups of the Trump domain and the explanation doesn't pass the smell test.

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...

And the evidence of a cover-up by the Trump Corporate IT director (Cho) is on the following pages.

According to Cho, at the time of the suspicious activity, the domain maill.trumpemail.com belonged to the Trump Organization's email marketing company, Cendyn Hospitality Marketing.5142 Cho learned from Cendyn that the trump-email.com domain was originally created for Trump Hotels email marketing sometime between 2009 and 20115143 and the domain had been used as recently as November 2015 for Trump Hotel marketing emails.5144 At some point prior to September 29, 2016, the domain registration was transferred from Cendyn to the Trump Organization; internal emails suggested it may have occurred on September 23, 2016, around the time the press began inquiring, although Cho could not identify any specific date with certainty.5145 According to Cho, the Trump domain had been used to send mass marketing emails, but not to receive email.5146
Cho looked up the IP addresses belonging to the two Alfa Bank servers. Based on a port scan of one server's IP address on October 1, 2016, Cho found that it was not configured as an email or web server: "It only had port 53 open, which is a port for DNS lookup."5147 From this, he inferred that both of the Alfa Bank servers were configured as DNS servers, and therefore could not have been used to transmit email communications to the Trump domain. 5148 Cho did not explain if he also conducted a port scan of the other Alfa Bank IP address, or how he determined that the configuration on October 1, 2016 would have been the same as the server's configuration during the time period in question.
Cho did not recall conducting a system-wide review of the Trump Organization network to determine if there wer~ any connections from the Trump Organization side with any of the Alfa Bank servers.5149 Instead, he looked up the public IP addresses for two separate Alfa Bank email servers he had identified, which he then provided to Cendyn to check if Cendyn could identify communications involving those servers.5150 In response, Cendyn found six messages to Alfa Bank recipients from clients using one of its email applications, but stated that these communications were not connected to the Trump Organization.5151 Cendyn identified these as emails sent by existing banking or hotel customers of Cendyn through a meeting management application to an Alfa Bank email address.5152 Cho did not locate any substantive communications between the Trump Organization and the two Alfa Bank servers and did not pursue further investigation of the DNS activity.5
Cendyn did not explain how the unusualDNS lookup activity might relate to those emails and did not filter its records to find information like the DNS logs at issue.515~ Nonetheless, based on Cendyn's findings, Cho concluded that the rough "correlation" between these email~ and the DNS logs might explain how the press had "put these together as some kind of activity between Alfa Bank and Cendyn, which happened to have one of their host names with our Trump name in it, 'Trump-email.com."'5155 The Committee did not engage C,endyn on this matter.
Unprompted, the Committee also received two letters, dated March 16 and July 20, 2018, from an attorney representing Alfa Bank conveying the findings of internal investigations into the unusual DNS activity. The letters represented that Alfa Bank had retained Mandiant, acyber incident response firm, to conduct an internal investigation based on the DNS logs and had found no evidence of substantive communications between Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization.5156 However, one letter noted that Alfa Bank had "continue[d] to receive unsolicited marketing emails from an address allegedly affiliated with the Trump Organization," which it did not identify.5157 As to the cause of the DNS activity, that letter posited Mandiant's "working hypothesis is that the activity was caused by a marketing or spam campaign directed at Alfa Bank employees by a marketing server affiliated with the Trump Organization."5158

And then several paragraphs of blacked out text.

cnst6• 5 years ago

It's a pretty common and standard practice for the mail servers to check that the domain specified in the MAIL FROM command of SMTP does exist. If it doesn't, the mail is immediately rejected at the SMTP level.

This check goes through a local recursive DNS server. You often have to have the DNS port open for recursive DNS servers to work properly (over UDP). Which would be the IP address where the lookup were to originate from.

How exactly is receiving a spam marketing email from a big hotel chain by a bank employee controversial?

WoahNoun11• 5 years ago

Because if it was a marketing campaign, there would be other IP addresses doing a DNS lookup. Alfa bank was 77% of the DNS requests and another 20% were from Spectrum Health which is associated with the DeVos family. That doesn't sound like a marketing campaign. And the marketing company said they stopped sending emails before the DNS lookups happened. The Trump org also created a new domain and the first DNS request was Alfa bank.

But Cendyn told CNN that its contract to provide email marketing services to the Trump Organization ended in March 2016 — weeks before the DNS lookups chronicled by the researchers started appearing. Cendyn told CNN that a different client had been communicating with Alfa Bank using Cendyn communications applications — a claim that Alfa Bank denied.
Scrutinizing the Trump Organization’s online footprint, the researchers determined that for several months during the spring and summer of 2016, Internet servers at Alfa Bank in Russia, Spectrum Health in Michigan, and Heartland Payment Systems in New Jersey accounted for nearly all of the several thousand DNS lookups for a specific Trump Organization server (mail1.trump-email.com).
Foer wrote that The Times hadn’t yet been in touch with the Trump campaign about the DNS data when the Trump email domain suddenly went offline. Odder still, four days later the Trump Organization created a new host — trump1.contact-client.com — and the very first DNS lookup to that new domain came from servers at Alfa Bank.

malwarebytess• 5 years ago

You can tell this is political drivel because the only thing here is speculation on the motivation of the delivery of the information, not on the veracity of the information itself.

Krebson Security's take on this is the best one I've seen. Their conclusion is solid: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/09/lawsuits-indictments-rev...

opwieurposiu• 5 years ago

Actually there are plenty of reasons to doubt the veracity of the dns data this narrative is based on.

https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2020-04/Ankura_A...

WoahNoun11• 5 years ago

Is there any evidence in that article that you can cite for us? That website was started by an extremely pro-Trump Fox News contributor and I have no intention on clicking on it.

cnst6• 5 years ago

Krebs literally posts a PNG image citing court filings listing 10 IP addresses responsible for 100% of DNS traffic for a public domain name over a period of 4.5 months. Actual origin of the underlying data is never explained, of course, but I do like how the total of the 10 is explicitly listed as 100%! Nevermind the internet bots scanning the whole internet, DomainTools and PassiveTotal reportedly having a long-term record of these same domain names since 2010 (for the "old" mail1 domain) and 2009 (for the "new" domain at the same IP address), respectively, and many other internet scanning services knowing about it, too, as per Ankura's 2020 report linked in the sibling comment. When did Krebs stop being an investigative journalist and went to being a political hack saying we shouldn't prosecute people for lying to the authorities to spur phantom investigations?

Most ironic is an out of context quote from Paul Vixie about a conspiracy with out-of-band communication for DNS discovery, because clearly there's no other possible explanation for discovering public FQDNs that have been known to exist since 2009! Meanwhile, if you've ever looked at Paul's Twitter feed over the last 4 years, it's pretty clear which party he supports and which single president he despises and would have done anything to get rid of; but I'm sure that has no relevance to the case, and he is still being objective in suggesting conspiracy theories that involve DNS in some way, without ever bothering to verify the authenticity of the data that he's presented with to make public comments on.

How's Krebs' the best take if it's the same lies propagated by the mainstream media? Not to mention that most DNS software doesn't even log any non-AXFR DNS requests at all (DNS works really fast over UDP and is very cheap unlike HTTP, and logging all requests to disk will slow down peak performance considerably), plus where the log comes from is never explained, either. Reminds me of diversion of media attention through "a story that nobody can disprove and which will be believed even if it's denied". Yes, Prime Minister, S2E2, "Official Secrets", ©1987 BBC.

rangoon626• 5 years ago

I'm still with her

kiriberty• 5 years ago

This news is not worthy of this feed.

mingus88• 5 years ago

You lost me at “fabricated Steele dossier” because as I was closely following everything Muller related in real time, including reading all 300+ pages of the report (which it seems few bothered to do) one thing became abundantly clear is that Steele got it so much closer than anyone could have expected

leereeves3• 5 years ago

The Mueller report concluded: "Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities."

How do you square that with the Steele report, which alleged exactly that? Steele and Mueller may have agreed about some details, but not about the primary claim.

WoahNoun11• 5 years ago

Yea because Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort coordinated through KGB asset Konstantin Kilimnik, as documented in the Republican-led Senate intelligence report, and not directly with the Russian government.

WoahNoun11• 5 years ago

That was NOT Mueller's conclusion. That was Bill Barr's politically motivated summary of the Mueller report. Mueller concluded there was contacts between Trump campaign and the Russians government but it wasn't enough evidence to successfully prosecute. The actual Mueller report says:

As explained in Section IV above, the Office’s investigation uncovered evidence of numerous links (i.e., contacts) between Trump Campaign officials and individuals having or claiming to have ties to the Russian government. The Office evaluated the contacts under several sets of federal laws, including conspiracy laws and statutes governing foreign agents who operate in the United States. After considering the available evidence, the Office did not pursue charges under these statutes against any of the individuals discussed in Section IV above—with the exception of FARA charges against Paul Manafort and Richard Gates based on their activities on behalf of Ukraine.
One of the interactions between the Trump Campaign and Russian-affiliated individuals—the June 9, 2016 meeting between high-ranking campaign officials and Russians promising derogatory information on Hillary Clinton—implicates an additional body of law: campaign finance statutes. Schemes involving the solicitation or receipt of assistance from foreign sources raise difficult statutory and constitutional questions. As explained below, the Office evaluated those questions in connection with the June 9 meeting [REDACTED]. The Office ultimately concluded that, even if the principal legal questions were resolved favorably to the government, a prosecution would encounter difficulties proving that Campaign officials or Investigative Technique individuals connected to the Campaign willfully violated the law.
Finally, although the evidence of contacts between Campaign officials and Russia affiliated individuals may not have been sufficient to establish or sustain criminal charges, several U.S. persons connected to the Campaign made false statements about those contacts and took other steps to obstruct the Office’s investigation and those of Congress. This Office has therefore charged some of those individuals with making false statements and obstructing justice.

drekipus• 5 years ago

I find it surprising that the Russians conspiracy was seemingly forgotten during the voting machine debate after getting Trump out. As far as picking our favourite conspiracy I do find some of the inconsistencies of the 2020 election to be interesting-for-interesting-sake.

I'd love to see someone do a teardown or analysis on the voting machines or that "F" vote curve. But that probably won't happen for another 30 years until this all blows over and we can talk about it objectively again.

_delibash_• 5 years ago

The torrent of comments smearing Aaron and his work as drivel is indicative of how incredibly effective the Russiagate media spectacle really was. Americans are so thoroughly propagandized, so lavishly disinformed and lied to that they actually think the interests of the security state are THEIR interests.

New evidence of fabrications behind the Trump-Russia theory

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