Was There a Connection Between a Russian Bank and the Trump Campaign? A team of computer scientists sifted through records of unusual Web traffic in search of answers. ... As Max and his colleagues searched D.N.S. logs for domains associated with Republican candidates, they were perplexed by what they encountered. “We went looking for fingerprints similar to what was on the D.N.C. computers, but we didn’t find what we were looking for,” Max told me. “We found something totally different—something unique.” In the small town of Lititz, Pennsylvania, a domain linked to the Trump Organization (mail1.trump-email.com) seemed to be behaving in a peculiar way. The server that housed the domain belonged to a company called Listrak, which mostly helped deliver mass-marketing e-mails: blasts of messages advertising spa treatments, Las Vegas weekends, and other enticements. Some Trump Organization domains sent mass e-mail blasts, but the one that Max and his colleagues spotted appeared not to be sending anything. At the same time, though, a very small group of companies seemed to be trying to communicate with it. 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. ... https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/...between-a-russian-bank-and-the-trump-campaign ____________________________________ It's a lengthy article. Bottom line, it seems some secret communication between Trump's campaign and Russia, and one which clearly involves the DeVos family, has been discovered through some detective work. I originally came across this via The Young Turks. Their video about this:
Seems is the proper word. It means nobody is claiming indisputable evidence, a concept we seem to have abandoned recently.
This all goes back to the questions raised just before the election. The connection between Trump's people and phony money laundering operations for dealings with countries including Russia. It's little be better than a conspiracy theory, with lots of dots to connect, but it does deserve investigation. After the first handful of Trump's "team" got arrested, this whole thing got quiet.
Is there any evidence that could be presented that would have you believing Trump colluded with Russia? I'm not saying that he has - I haven't seen proof myself. But I am curious about what it would take for Trump supporters to believe that he had colluded.
Once American banking no longer worked with Trump (after being jilted by bankruptcies) he had no choice but to go elsewhere for financing. The "interesting" fundamentals of Russian banking and its unique form of business practice also appealed I'm sure.
From the OP - " Alfa Bank’s computers were looking up the address of the Trump server nearly every day." If there was collusion, Alfa would know Trump's server address and wouldn't have to look it up.
