7 ms·

New evidence of fabrications behind the Trump-Russia theory

87 points by cnst 5y ago

mingus88 5y 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
- leereeves 5y 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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - WoahNoun 5y 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.
    - leereeves 5y ago
      The only allegation I've ever heard is that Manafort shared polling data with Kilimnik. I'd hardly call that coordinating election interference, and apparently Mueller agreed because he knew about the polling data and still reached the conclusion above.[1] And in the interest of accuracy you should also mention that Manafort was only campaign manager for two months, from June 20 to August 19 of 2016, and he was removed from the campaign, reportedly, because of his Russian connections. "On August 17, 2016, Trump received his first security briefing. The same day, August 17, Trump shook up his campaign organization in a way that appeared to minimize Manafort's role. It was reported that members of Trump's family, particularly Kushner, who had originally been a strong backer of Manafort, had become uneasy about his Russian connections and suspected that he had not been forthright about them. Manafort stated in an internal staff memorandum that he would "remain the campaign chairman and chief strategist, providing the big-picture, long-range campaign vision". However, two days later, Trump announced his acceptance of Manafort's resignation from the campaign after Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway took on senior leadership roles within that campaign."[2] 1: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/paul-manafort-mueller-investigation-konstantin-kilimnik_n_5c337efce4b09b02cb328230?2ou= https://www.huffpost.com/entry/paul-manafort-mueller-investi... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Manafort#Chairman_of_Trump's_2016_campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Manafort#Chairman_of_Trum...
      - momdad420 5y ago
        Lmao you so desperately want to make it nothing
  - WoahNoun 5y 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.
    - leereeves 5y ago
      > That was NOT Mueller's conclusion. Don't spread misinformation, that was a DIRECT QUOTE from the Mueller report: "Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities." You can see it in [1] or [2] or in the report itself. So there were a few contacts. So what? Presidential campaigns talk to a lot of people and don't vet them all in advance. As your own quote says: "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 [not Russia]." 1: https://www.factcheck.org/2019/04/what-the-mueller-report-says-about-russian-contacts/ https://www.factcheck.org/2019/04/what-the-mueller-report-sa... 2: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2019/apr/18/mueller-report-trump-russia-key-takeaways https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2019/apr/...
drekipus 5y 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.
oh_sigh 5y 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 5y 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"
- sorethescore 5y 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.
sorethescore 5y 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.
cryptoz 5y ago
So are my eyes and ears lying to me? I didn't hear with my own ears that Trump asked Russia to hack for him on TV? I didn't hear that happen!? And Trump never went to Russia, was never compromised, never invited Russian spies to the white house, etc? I don't get it, this piece is ridiculous and doesn't match reality _at all_. Why is this trash on HN?
mikeyouse 5y 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-jordan-of-ken-starrs/ 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-revive-trump-alfa-bank-story/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/09/lawsuits-indictments-rev...
- ttyprintk 5y ago
  HN on the Krebs article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28629227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28629227 You might move the discussion there and away from this one.
Multiplayer 5y ago
Why is this on Hacker News?
- blunte 5y ago
  If I were a conspiracy theorist, and if I had read many times about how troll farms worked (and where they originated, and about their goals to destabilize regions and create divides amongst the people), I might guess that this story was posted and promoted by such people.
  - cryptoz 5y ago
    For years at least, perhaps a decade or more, there has been a decent-size far-right crowd on HN that subscribes to conspiracy theories themselves. Perhaps this post is a troll farm's doing, perhaps it is organic behavior on HN. From my perspective, HN is very conservative/right leaning at least, and large numbers of voters and commenters are on here and support far-right-wing views. There is a lot of racism, white supremacy, misogyny, and anti-LGBT sentiment here. I have been called more hateful slurs on HN than I have anywhere else online or IRL. shrug. Hard to say about how organic this story is.
  - dang 5y ago
    It's against the site rules to post such insinuations without evidence. Please read and stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I've explained hundreds of times why we have that rule. Many of the explanations are reachable by scrolling back through https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturf https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for the longer comments.
    - lvs 5y ago
      Isn't the entire post an insinuation without evidence?
- dang 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
spamizbad 5y 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.
- WoahNoun 5y ago
  Yes it matters. It was an attack on our democracy and national security by an aggressive foreign adversary.
  - aaomidi 5y 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.
    - happytoexplain 5y ago
      This doesn't appear to be true - as another commenter pointed out: "the only thing here is speculation on the motivation of the delivery of the information, not on the veracity of the information"
    - WoahNoun 5y ago
      The indictment is about whether the lawyer who sent a computer scientist's DNS analysis lied to the FBI about whether he was bringing the analysis on behalf of anyone. He said No, but was working for the Clinton campaign at the time. The indictment doesn't challenge the contents of the analysis and the lawyer claims this was unrelated to his work on/for the campaign. They better have some hard evidence that the Clinton campaign directed him to go to the FBI or the Trump special prosecutor will lose this case badly. As least try and understand the details of what is going on.
      - nzmsv 5y ago
risk 5y ago
i flagged this shitpost. how did it get 37 points?
- blunte 5y ago
  Is it possible that troll farms are slowly building up HN accounts which they can use to push something to the front page?
  - lvs 5y ago
    I agree with both of you. That this kind of political drivel is increasingly gaining traction here is strange.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - dang 5y ago
    Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28647191 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.
    - blunte 5y ago
      Asking the question about HN manipulation, when several other people have been asking, "How is this on HN", is unreasonable? Is HN somehow immune from the manipulation that much larger, much better funded sites have experienced (where ample evidence exists)? This was not some criticism of HN, this was a valid question which people should ponder on. Presumably most of us HN readers do not expect the content to be targeted manipulation or disinformation. But we cannot be blind to the possibility... else what is the point of even being here? When I am hitting HN (tonight at least) about every 15 minutes out of boredom, and I see a story pop up on the front page with rapidly increasing votes - especially a story that is rather controversial and not typically what HN people get uniformly excited about - I wonder if something unusual is going on. Perhaps it really is a lot of pro-Trump HN readers using their Friday afternoons to upvote this story, but that also seems unlikely.
BigToach 5y ago
Podcast breaking down what this indictment is. Starts around the 50s point. https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/lrc-presents-all-the-presidents-lawyers/an-unusual-indictment-an-unusual-memo https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/lrc-presents-all-the-preside...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
WoahNoun 5y 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/documents/report_volume5.pdf 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.
malwarebytess 5y 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-revive-trump-alfa-bank-story/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/09/lawsuits-indictments-rev...
- opwieurposiu 5y 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_AlfaBank_ResearchAnalysis_Apr2020dh.pdf.pdf.pdf https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2020-04/Ankura_A...
  - WoahNoun 5y 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.
    - cnst 5y ago
      It's a PDF document produced by Ankura Consulting Group. I didn't read it, but it's extremely trivial to generate outgoing DNS traffic from many networks with their own mail and DNS infrastructure (i.e., any big bank that has their own IT department), to any other domain name. All you do is connect to their mail server, and provide the domain name to query in MAIL FROM via SMTP. Which is basically the whole evidence that connects the parties together.
      - WoahNoun 5y ago
        Alfa Bank and the Trump campaign keep saying the DNS look-ups came from marketing emails. Did the DNS look-ups happen or didn't they?
rangoon626 5y ago
I'm still with her
kiriberty 5y ago
This news is not worthy of this feed.
_delibash_ 5y 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.

87 points by cnst 5y 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

leereeves 5y 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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- WoahNoun 5y 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.
  - leereeves 5y ago
    The only allegation I've ever heard is that Manafort shared polling data with Kilimnik. I'd hardly call that coordinating election interference, and apparently Mueller agreed because he knew about the polling data and still reached the conclusion above.[1] And in the interest of accuracy you should also mention that Manafort was only campaign manager for two months, from June 20 to August 19 of 2016, and he was removed from the campaign, reportedly, because of his Russian connections. "On August 17, 2016, Trump received his first security briefing. The same day, August 17, Trump shook up his campaign organization in a way that appeared to minimize Manafort's role. It was reported that members of Trump's family, particularly Kushner, who had originally been a strong backer of Manafort, had become uneasy about his Russian connections and suspected that he had not been forthright about them. Manafort stated in an internal staff memorandum that he would "remain the campaign chairman and chief strategist, providing the big-picture, long-range campaign vision". However, two days later, Trump announced his acceptance of Manafort's resignation from the campaign after Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway took on senior leadership roles within that campaign."[2] 1: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/paul-manafort-mueller-investigation-konstantin-kilimnik_n_5c337efce4b09b02cb328230?2ou= https://www.huffpost.com/entry/paul-manafort-mueller-investi... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Manafort#Chairman_of_Trump's_2016_campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Manafort#Chairman_of_Trum...
    - momdad420 5y ago
      Lmao you so desperately want to make it nothing
- WoahNoun 5y 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.
  - leereeves 5y ago
    > That was NOT Mueller's conclusion. Don't spread misinformation, that was a DIRECT QUOTE from the Mueller report: "Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities." You can see it in [1] or [2] or in the report itself. So there were a few contacts. So what? Presidential campaigns talk to a lot of people and don't vet them all in advance. As your own quote says: "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 [not Russia]." 1: https://www.factcheck.org/2019/04/what-the-mueller-report-says-about-russian-contacts/ https://www.factcheck.org/2019/04/what-the-mueller-report-sa... 2: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2019/apr/18/mueller-report-trump-russia-key-takeaways https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2019/apr/...

drekipus 5y 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.

oh_sigh 5y 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 5y 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"

sorethescore 5y 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.

sorethescore 5y 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.

cryptoz 5y ago

So are my eyes and ears lying to me? I didn't hear with my own ears that Trump asked Russia to hack for him on TV? I didn't hear that happen!? And Trump never went to Russia, was never compromised, never invited Russian spies to the white house, etc? I don't get it, this piece is ridiculous and doesn't match reality _at all_. Why is this trash on HN?

mikeyouse 5y 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-jordan-of-ken-starrs/ 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-revive-trump-alfa-bank-story/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/09/lawsuits-indictments-rev...

ttyprintk 5y ago
HN on the Krebs article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28629227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28629227 You might move the discussion there and away from this one.

Multiplayer 5y ago

Why is this on Hacker News?

blunte 5y ago
If I were a conspiracy theorist, and if I had read many times about how troll farms worked (and where they originated, and about their goals to destabilize regions and create divides amongst the people), I might guess that this story was posted and promoted by such people.
- cryptoz 5y ago
  For years at least, perhaps a decade or more, there has been a decent-size far-right crowd on HN that subscribes to conspiracy theories themselves. Perhaps this post is a troll farm's doing, perhaps it is organic behavior on HN. From my perspective, HN is very conservative/right leaning at least, and large numbers of voters and commenters are on here and support far-right-wing views. There is a lot of racism, white supremacy, misogyny, and anti-LGBT sentiment here. I have been called more hateful slurs on HN than I have anywhere else online or IRL. shrug. Hard to say about how organic this story is.
- dang 5y ago
  It's against the site rules to post such insinuations without evidence. Please read and stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I've explained hundreds of times why we have that rule. Many of the explanations are reachable by scrolling back through https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturf https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for the longer comments.
  - lvs 5y ago
    Isn't the entire post an insinuation without evidence?
dang 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

spamizbad 5y 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.

WoahNoun 5y ago
Yes it matters. It was an attack on our democracy and national security by an aggressive foreign adversary.
- aaomidi 5y 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.
  - happytoexplain 5y ago
    This doesn't appear to be true - as another commenter pointed out: "the only thing here is speculation on the motivation of the delivery of the information, not on the veracity of the information"
  - WoahNoun 5y ago
    The indictment is about whether the lawyer who sent a computer scientist's DNS analysis lied to the FBI about whether he was bringing the analysis on behalf of anyone. He said No, but was working for the Clinton campaign at the time. The indictment doesn't challenge the contents of the analysis and the lawyer claims this was unrelated to his work on/for the campaign. They better have some hard evidence that the Clinton campaign directed him to go to the FBI or the Trump special prosecutor will lose this case badly. As least try and understand the details of what is going on.
    - nzmsv 5y ago

risk 5y ago

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

blunte 5y ago
Is it possible that troll farms are slowly building up HN accounts which they can use to push something to the front page?
- lvs 5y ago
  I agree with both of you. That this kind of political drivel is increasingly gaining traction here is strange.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- dang 5y ago
  Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28647191 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.
  - blunte 5y ago
    Asking the question about HN manipulation, when several other people have been asking, "How is this on HN", is unreasonable? Is HN somehow immune from the manipulation that much larger, much better funded sites have experienced (where ample evidence exists)? This was not some criticism of HN, this was a valid question which people should ponder on. Presumably most of us HN readers do not expect the content to be targeted manipulation or disinformation. But we cannot be blind to the possibility... else what is the point of even being here? When I am hitting HN (tonight at least) about every 15 minutes out of boredom, and I see a story pop up on the front page with rapidly increasing votes - especially a story that is rather controversial and not typically what HN people get uniformly excited about - I wonder if something unusual is going on. Perhaps it really is a lot of pro-Trump HN readers using their Friday afternoons to upvote this story, but that also seems unlikely.

BigToach 5y ago

Podcast breaking down what this indictment is. Starts around the 50s point. https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/lrc-presents-all-the-presidents-lawyers/an-unusual-indictment-an-unusual-memo https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/lrc-presents-all-the-preside...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

WoahNoun 5y 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/documents/report_volume5.pdf 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.

malwarebytess 5y 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-revive-trump-alfa-bank-story/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/09/lawsuits-indictments-rev...

opwieurposiu 5y 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_AlfaBank_ResearchAnalysis_Apr2020dh.pdf.pdf.pdf https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2020-04/Ankura_A...
- WoahNoun 5y 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.
  - cnst 5y ago
    It's a PDF document produced by Ankura Consulting Group. I didn't read it, but it's extremely trivial to generate outgoing DNS traffic from many networks with their own mail and DNS infrastructure (i.e., any big bank that has their own IT department), to any other domain name. All you do is connect to their mail server, and provide the domain name to query in MAIL FROM via SMTP. Which is basically the whole evidence that connects the parties together.
    - WoahNoun 5y ago
      Alfa Bank and the Trump campaign keep saying the DNS look-ups came from marketing emails. Did the DNS look-ups happen or didn't they?

rangoon626 5y ago

I'm still with her

kiriberty 5y ago

This news is not worthy of this feed.

_delibash_ 5y 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.