As Robert Mueller moves in, Trump Tower’s Russian email server is more crucial than ever

| 10:14 pm EST March 4, 2018
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Today’s episode of Classic Trump is a collection of notes I’ve had in my files for several years, so while it’s not today’s news, it’s part of my series of ‘he did what’? This story is based on an article written in Slate and I’ll reference it at the end for those who are geeky like me. There is no way to write a comprehensive story in our allotted space here. This is the PG (partly geeky) version.

Back in 2016, CrowdStrike was hired to review the aftermath of the DNC hacking. This was pretty widely reported and we’ve learned a lot more about all the Russian hacking since then. But one issue that always scared the crud out of me was what they discovered, and to this day, we don’t really know what was going on.

Very talented malware hunters were contracted to do a deep dive into the domain name system (DNS) and in their search they found what amounted to a tiny needle in a haystack. If you’ve ever looked at the data that’s hidden in email, you have a little clue about what this data is. They found something that appeared to be malware coming from Russia with its only destination domain with “Trump” in the name, via a server in Trump Tower. There was also a minor connection to Spectrum Health, which has ties to the Devos family (link). To put this into perspective, a normal mail server will have thousands or millions of mail going in and out and are easily located. No one can read the mail, just the headers.

The main aspect of this story was a server with ties to ALFABANK, a Putin-connected bank. What appeared to be an intentional attempt at trying to hide in a ‘secretive’ fashion with only one destination, a server at Trump Tower. They went through extraordinary steps to avoid detection. There are nothing more than guesses about what they were doing, but it appeared to be trading emails, but only one inbound and one outbound a day. And always during their respective business hours suggesting people were actively transmitting something.

When the NY Times asked about it, Trump’s Hope Hicks said they knew nothing about a mystery server, yet the very next day it stopped functioning. A new server was created, it was immediately spotted, and again, Trump was asked about it. It never sent any messages.

We don’t know what this is about and may never know. But it’s all part of the shady underbelly of everything Trump. Something sinister seems about the only logical conclusion. And with us learning more and more about all the Russian interference and the 13 Russian Mueller Indictments, we really need to find out exactly what they were doing. I don’t like using words like ‘treason’ but this has always felt like a really big find and should scare all of us if Trump and Russia were trading ultra-secret information. The idea that Trump shut down a server they denied existing after an inquiry is more than mere coincidence.

If this wasn’t deadly serious, you’d think it was a James Patterson spy novel. We can wait for the movie. For the original 2016 story from Slate, here’s the link. It’s technical and complicated, but if you understand basic server technology, you can follow along.