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You are here: Home / Past Elections / Election 2016 / You’re The Puppet – Updated at 8:15 PM EDT

You’re The Puppet – Updated at 8:15 PM EDT

by Tom Levenson|  October 31, 20167:33 pm| 265 Comments

This post is in: Election 2016, Hail to the Hairpiece, Good News For Conservatives

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Franklin Foer is up with an almost-incendiary new piece at Slate on Trump’s secret email link to a Russian bank. And here’s what Foer has found:

The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation—conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.

russian-puppet

Alfa Bank deep and old ties to Vladimir Putin in an admittedly complicated history described in part (as Foer cites)in this work.

Yesterday, when Senator Harry Reid posted his letter suggesting that FBI Director Comey was sitting on “explosive” information about Trump’s ties to Russia, some serious people suggested that was just Reid blowing smoke — the way he provoked Romney with his claim that the 2012 GOP nominee hadn’t paid taxes in a decade (which wasn’t true, at least for the two years the RomBot deigned to release his partial returns.)  I got into a twitter fight about that with Tom Nichols, who many (including me) see as a smart and honest-broker conservative.  Reid’s tactics pissed him (and many others) waaaaay off, and the default was to assume that this latest was more of the same.

Well, perhaps, not so much.

One of the interesting aspects of Foer’s stories is that the New York Times is on it too.  Foer writes:

Around the same time [September], the New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers began chasing the story. (They are still pursuing it.)

I have been (today! on Twitter) extremely critical of the Times‘ coverage of this election, particularly its disastrous refusal to accept the sunk cost of their dry-hole Clinton email investigation. This would be a good moment to redeem, in part, the institutional failure there to follow up on Trump stories with the kind of in-depth reporting that the Post’s David Fahrenthold and Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald, among some others, have produced.

But leave aside the press wars for a moment, and contemplate what Foer has uncovered, partial and circumstantial as it is.  For months, with communication peaking at politically significant moments, Donald Trump maintained a secret communication link with the highest levels of the Russian kleptocracy.

Throughout this election one of the core unanswered questions has been “Who owns Donald Trump.” The single real failure of journalism in this campaign has been the lack of a sustained effort to crack that query.  Now we have a partial answer, circumstantial, inferential, but more solid than all the months-long Trump denials of connections between his organization and Russian institutions.

Absent any better information, the prudent response is that the possibility that Putin owns Trump is non-trivially real — and hence makes it waaaaaay too risky to allow him and his associates anywhere near power.

And, of course, we are within days of the choice that could make him President of the United States.

Mind boggling.

PS:  Bat signal for Adam. I’d love some actual knowledgeable commentary on this. (Feel free to attach to this or a new front page item, if you’re so moved, btw.)

Image: Big Philanthropic Puppet Bazaar Saint Petersburg, 1899

Update at 8:15 PM EDT by Adam L. Silverman

Tom asked me to weigh in here, so here goes. I am not a computer scientist and while I’ve taught one criminology course on cyber based crime and terrorism way back in 2006, wrote a paper with a computer science specialist on how the Internet can be used to transmit extremist ideology and promote terrorism back in 2003, other than reading up, as necessary for work, on what the US is doing within the cyber domain, I can’t comment on the technical aspects of Foer’s reporting. I do, however, have expertise with both link and social network analysis; especially to determine who is connected to who to understand an operating environment. In this case, based on Foer’s reporting and the work of the subject matter experts he’s citing, there appears to be a confirmed connection (link) between two nodes (with a weaker link between one node and a third node). And that connection runs two ways and based on what the technical subject matter experts indicate that two way connection is for the purpose of electronic communication. The two nodes are a Trump Organization server and a Russian oligarch owned bank who’s owners have ties to Vladimir Putin.

At this point there are only two real questions: 1) Is the appearance of a two way communicative connection between the Trump Organization (node 1) and Alfa Bank (node two) actual or an digital artifact? Foer’s reporting seems to settle this that it is actual/real. And 2) What was the purpose of the communication? Was it simply for mundane business purposes – that the Trump Organization has accepted investment from Alfa Bank or those that keep their money there or that the Trump Organization has accepted loans to keep its operations going from Alfa Bank in order to maintain liquidity? Or was the purpose of the communications for something else? There is insufficient information to answer those questions based on Foer’s reporting. Hopefully the NY Times or some other enterprising journalists such as David Farenthold or Kurt Eichenwald might be able to shed some light on that before election day.

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Previous Post: « I’ll take partisan hackery for $500, Alex
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Reader Interactions

265Comments

  1. 1.

    bago

    October 31, 2016 at 7:38 pm

    It’s. DNS aggregate data, indicating that party A wanted to start a conversation with party B, and party B made them selves real hard to talk to by accident.

  2. 2.

    debbie

    October 31, 2016 at 7:39 pm

    I’m not seeing anything in the NYT. Are they waiting until after the election?

  3. 3.

    JPL

    October 31, 2016 at 7:39 pm

    Trump has been on the trail stating he has no ties with Russia. Even if what he did was legal, it would be a lie, and explain his reason for supporting Putin.

    There is enough information that Hillary should use this, and demand he release his tax returns.

  4. 4.

    Van Buren

    October 31, 2016 at 7:40 pm

    Looking forward to the pundits explaining why all this is nothing to worry our pretty little minds about.

  5. 5.

    debbie

    October 31, 2016 at 7:40 pm

    Hillary ClintonVerified account ‏@HillaryClinton 8m8 minutes ago
    It’s time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia. http://slate.me/2dWggCd

    Guess someone’s on it.

  6. 6.

    Chris

    October 31, 2016 at 7:41 pm

    Those poor dumb Soviet bastards.

    All that thankless effort they put into trying to undermine the West by promoting communism.

    When all they had to do was give fascism a few nudges in the right direction, then sit back and watch the West destroy itself.

  7. 7.

    Davis X. Machina

    October 31, 2016 at 7:42 pm

    Trump has been on the trail stating he has no ties with Russia

    Plan B — he does have ties with Russia, but that’s only because unlike Hillary-the-Warmonger — who lives in the past and still is stuck in a Cold-War mentality — he’s really interested in cooperation, and world peace, and not starting WW III.

  8. 8.

    debbie

    October 31, 2016 at 7:43 pm

    Why am I in moderation? I just pasted in a Tweet from the Clinton campaign saying it’s time for Trump to answer questions about his ties to Russia.

  9. 9.

    Tom Levenson

    October 31, 2016 at 7:47 pm

    @debbie: You’ve been allowed out of Purgatory.

  10. 10.

    andy

    October 31, 2016 at 7:47 pm

    It’s been said before, but this latest remake of The Manchurian Candidate really really sucks…

  11. 11.

    Emma

    October 31, 2016 at 7:49 pm

    @Davis X. Machina: A private citizen isn’t allowed to conduct diplomacy. IF he were elected President he could do as much kumbaya as he wants.

  12. 12.

    debbie

    October 31, 2016 at 7:49 pm

    @Tom Levenson:

    Thanks, just in time for Halloween!

  13. 13.

    mike in dc

    October 31, 2016 at 7:49 pm

    Coupled with Manafort and Page’s ties to Russia, the weird platform change, Trump’s refusal to concede Russia is behind the hacking, his bizarre refusal to say anything adverse about Putin, etc., it does seem to suggest something hinky going on.

  14. 14.

    SFAW

    October 31, 2016 at 7:49 pm

    @Davis X. Machina:

    he’s really interested in cooperation, and world peace, and not starting WW III

    I eagerly await him making a speech, holding up a piece of paper, telling us that, with him as President, we’ll have Peace in Our Time.

  15. 15.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    October 31, 2016 at 7:50 pm

    Is this what Rick Wilson’s been hinting about? Along with others predicting a big bomb to drop on Trump this week, or maybe 2?

  16. 16.

    Mike J

    October 31, 2016 at 7:50 pm

    @debbie: naked link

  17. 17.

    mkro

    October 31, 2016 at 7:50 pm

    I heard Trump tried to compare Hillary having an email server to a “worse crime than Watergate”.

    While that is clearly absurd, the interesting thing to me is that someone illegally hacking into and stealing files (emails in this case) of the DNC the Democratic presidential candidate, sounds almost EXACTLY like what happened in the case of Watergate.

    Instead, the media just keep reporting on Wikileaks’ daily dump and not following the trail, doing the hard work that Bernstein and Woodward did.

  18. 18.

    MomSense

    October 31, 2016 at 7:50 pm

    Oh my god. Just saw video of Senator Burr laughing that he saw a photo of Clinton on the cover of Rifleman magazine but it didn’t have a bullseye on it. Hahahaha. Yes murder and political assassination is hilarious.

    Deplorable.

  19. 19.

    WereBear

    October 31, 2016 at 7:53 pm

    @andy: Casting. Crucial when it comes to making a movie work.

  20. 20.

    SFAW

    October 31, 2016 at 7:53 pm

    @mike in dc:

    Coupled with Manafort and Page’s ties to Russia, the weird platform change, Trump’s refusal to concede Russia is behind the hacking, his bizarre refusal to say anything adverse about Putin, etc., it does seem to suggest something hinky going on.

    Well than, thank FSM! that Junior G-Man #2 Jim Comey (#1 was Louie Freeh) is on the case! He’ll have an explosive report out any day now. As long as the report says that it was Hillary’s e-mails to Putin that were the problem. Trump’s communistcation, on the other hand — “Nothing to see here, comrades!”

  21. 21.

    Carlo Graziani

    October 31, 2016 at 7:54 pm

    The thing that struck me was the utter ineptitude of the “surreptitious” re-establishment of contact between Trumpistan and Alfa after they were busted on Reddit the first time.

    They knew that they had DNS super-users watching their traffic. It would have been perfectly straightforward to set up two static IP addresses, and communicated directly with those, generating no DNS traffic at all. Then the researchers would have lost the trail.

    But no, some IT drone got told to set up a new suuper seekrit channel, and he did the same damn thing that got them busted in the first place. What a bunch of clueless apes — they make Clinton’s private e-mail server IT team look like genuises, and that takes a lot of work.

  22. 22.

    PsiFighter37

    October 31, 2016 at 7:55 pm

    @a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): 8 days until the election.

    I suspect that Slate got this article out there, even though they couldn’t connect all the dots, simply because there was not time. I guarantee that there will be a lot of editors and writers out there thinking about whether it’s their responsibility to get stuff out there before people vote.

    As for the Clinton oppo team – now is the time to start emptying the cartridge on Trump.

  23. 23.

    p.a.

    October 31, 2016 at 7:56 pm

    @a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): If nothing tRump has said/done so far has dropped him to his deserved 9%, will a Putin link really matter to the deplorables?

  24. 24.

    SFAW

    October 31, 2016 at 7:57 pm

    @Carlo Graziani:

    they make Clinton’s private e-mail server IT team look like genuises, and that takes a lot of work.

    Maybe I missed it, but has information come to light that Hillary’s private server got hacked or compromised in any way?

  25. 25.

    Schlemazel

    October 31, 2016 at 7:57 pm

    @MomSense:
    I will be eternally grateful that these assholes have not taken shots at President Obama, I honestly feared he would not make it through his first 4 years. I guess that is a concern for the next 8 years now. There are loonies in all parties but only a couple of them, the GOP and Libertarian, encourage their loonies to act on their insanity.

  26. 26.

    Snarki, child of Loki

    October 31, 2016 at 7:58 pm

    “FBI looking into Espionage charges against Trump”

    Well, they *should*

  27. 27.

    Archon

    October 31, 2016 at 7:59 pm

    @Davis X. Machina:

    Apologies for the confusion, but is that real analysis or is that a parody of the type of defense we’d expect from Trump’s deplorables?

  28. 28.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    October 31, 2016 at 8:00 pm

    If anyone had asked me last year what work of art this election would remind me of, very possibly the last thing I would have said is “Hmm, maybe Petrushka?”

    Petrushka tells the story of the loves and jealousies of three puppets. The three are brought to life by the Charlatan during 1830 Shrovetide Fair (Maslenitsa) in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Petrushka loves the Ballerina, but she rejects him. She prefers the Moor. Petrushka is angry and hurt, and challenges the Moor. The Moor kills him with his scimitar. Petrushka’s ghost rises above the puppet theatre as night falls. He shakes his fist at the Charlatan, then collapses in a second death.

  29. 29.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    October 31, 2016 at 8:00 pm

    @debbie:

    The tweet contained a naked hyperlink, which, as has been pointed out ad infinitum, lands you in moderation.

  30. 30.

    SFAW

    October 31, 2016 at 8:01 pm

    @Snarki, child of Loki:

    You seem to think that would matter. “Well, he HAD to, because the Obama Administration, and Crooked Hillary, are so corrupt, the he NEEDED to go around them to be able to educate the Masses!”

  31. 31.

    Droppy

    October 31, 2016 at 8:01 pm

    Would this be the same New York Times which decided to stop looking into all the icky details of the Florida recount debacle because 9-11 was bad and we shouldn’t criticize the brave people protecting us? the one that decided going into Iraq was a great idea, because Judith Miller said so? Yeah, they’ll jump right on this.

  32. 32.

    Chris

    October 31, 2016 at 8:01 pm

    @PsiFighter37:

    8 days until the election.

    I can’t tell if I want it to be over or not. I’m sick to death of everything about Drumpf, but if (knock on wood) Hillary Clinton wins, I can’t promise that I’ll enjoy the permanent investigation that the next four/eight years will consist of any more than I’m enjoying this.

  33. 33.

    Anoniminous

    October 31, 2016 at 8:02 pm

    @Tom Levenson:

    You’ve been allowed out of Purgatory.

    Wow. Balloon Juice got its very own Medieval Pope!

  34. 34.

    Major Major Major Major

    October 31, 2016 at 8:03 pm

    @Chris: yep. Brexit, soon Le Pen in France…

  35. 35.

    MomSense

    October 31, 2016 at 8:04 pm

    @Schlemazel:

    It seems to me that elected officials who joke about political violence and assassination would be disqualified in a nation that prides itself on the rule of law, democratic process, and the peaceful transition of power.

  36. 36.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    October 31, 2016 at 8:05 pm

    @Chris: So important we take the Senate. Not that I don’t know everybody here knows that, but I just heard Howard Fineman say on twitter that Toomey’s numbers are firming up, and Charlie Pierce thinks New Hampshire could be headed for recounts

    Do we think Burr’s comments on HRC and the USSC will hurt him in North Carolina?

  37. 37.

    Mary G

    October 31, 2016 at 8:06 pm

    I have been tempted to resume my half price digital subscription to the NYT, especially since they had an article saying that Darrell Issa, AKA “Trump’s Mini-Me” is in trouble. David Weigel also wrote one in the WaPo. Doug Applegate has had a lot of success saying that Issa was Trump before Trump.

    But tomorrow is a new month, when I get a new batch of free articles on each of my devices. So no $ for you.

  38. 38.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    October 31, 2016 at 8:07 pm

    @a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): I still always see your nick as “Fleck, Béla Q” at least for a second before I focus my eyes on it.

  39. 39.

    Schlemazel

    October 31, 2016 at 8:08 pm

    @MomSense:
    So, not here in America if you are a Republican.

  40. 40.

    Gin & Tonic

    October 31, 2016 at 8:09 pm

    @Carlo Graziani: That’s what’s really odd about this. If you have anyone with half a brain in your IT shop *and* you have an off-net channel of communication, simply tell each other the IP addresses of the SMTP servers and don’t use DNS at all. This is like not-very-smart 6th graders setting it up.

  41. 41.

    Davis X. Machina

    October 31, 2016 at 8:10 pm

    David Corn in Mojo: A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump

    Mother Jones has reviewed that report and other memos this former spy wrote. The first memo, based on the former intelligence officer’s conversations with Russian sources, noted, “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance.” It maintained that Trump “and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.” It claimed that Russian intelligence had “compromised” Trump during his visits to Moscow and could “blackmail him.” It also reported that Russian intelligence had compiled a dossier on Hillary Clinton based on “bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls.”

  42. 42.

    smintheus

    October 31, 2016 at 8:10 pm

    The Times hadn’t yet been in touch with the Trump campaign but shortly after it reached out to Alfa, the Trump domain name in question seemed to suddenly stop working. When the scientists looked up the host, the DNS server returned a fail message, evidence that it no longer functioned. The computer scientists believe there was one logical conclusion to be drawn: The Trump Organization shut down the server after Alfa was told that the Times might expose the connection. Weaver told me the Trump domain was “very sloppily removed.” Or as another of the researchers put it, it looked like “the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.”

    Four days later, on Sept. 27, the Trump Organization created a new host name, trump1.contact-client.com, which enabled communication to the very same server via a different route.

    Guess what entity was the first to contact the newly renamed trump1.contact-client.com? Yep, it was Alfa Bank. That’s the pivotal evidence. The only way Alfa could have found the new address was if Trump’s people gave it to them.

  43. 43.

    Gin & Tonic

    October 31, 2016 at 8:11 pm

    @Carlo Graziani:

    they make Clinton’s private e-mail server IT team look like genuises

    Have you seen any evidence of incompetence? I have not.

  44. 44.

    MomSense

    October 31, 2016 at 8:11 pm

    Wow and now Mother Jones is out with a big story about the Russian regime cultivating Trump for five years.

    wow

  45. 45.

    JPL

    October 31, 2016 at 8:12 pm

    This is the Trump’s response

    The email server, set up for marketing purposes and operated by a third-party, has not been used since 2010. The current traffic on the server from Alphabank’s [sic] IP address is regular DNS server traffic—not email traffic. To be clear, The Trump Organization is not sending or receiving any communications from this email server. The Trump Organization has no communication or relationship with this entity or any Russian entity.

    This doesn’t even make sense. Why set up a server, and not use it for emails.. Also, I will point out again that Trump does not do business with Russia.

  46. 46.

    Chris

    October 31, 2016 at 8:12 pm

    @Major Major Major Major:

    I like to point out that right wing politics have already come close to destroying this country three times. Once through open revolution (the Civil War), once through catastrophic economic mismanagement (the Great Depression), once through escalating nationalist/militarist rhetoric that nearly culminated in nuclear war (the Cuban missile crisis).

    And they’ll be goddamned if they’re not going to try again.

  47. 47.

    Irony Abounds

    October 31, 2016 at 8:12 pm

    None of this will be fully disclosed until after the election, and if Trump wins, which is now more likely that it was pre-Comey asshattery, this country is in for a world of hurt. Clinton emails is easily understood. Complicated Internet trails are not. The two oppo drops on Trump that Rick Wilson has alluded to had better come out and be very damaging. I just don’t like how this election is trending.

  48. 48.

    hovercraft

    October 31, 2016 at 8:13 pm

    Sheldon Whitehouse just took Comey out to the woodshed and shredded him.

  49. 49.

    Applejinx

    October 31, 2016 at 8:13 pm

    So the FBI _and_ Trump are Russian moles?

    Well, it explains why the Village are scared to call them on it. Imagine if you did and between the Kremlin, Trump, and the FBI, they did manage to get Trump elected in spite of you. Imagine how fucked you’d be. Genuinely gut-wrenchingly terrifying. Hunted by the Russian mob AND the FBI in tandem? Kiss your ass goodbye, plus that of everyone you know.

  50. 50.

    El Caganer

    October 31, 2016 at 8:13 pm

    @MomSense: But not necessarily in a nation that worships the Second Amendment.

  51. 51.

    jk

    October 31, 2016 at 8:14 pm

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liKhLNY5GYI

  52. 52.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    October 31, 2016 at 8:14 pm

    @Bill E Pilgrim: An honor. Mr. Q went to Victor Wooten’s bass camp so there’s a 2nd degree connection…

  53. 53.

    Major Major Major Major

    October 31, 2016 at 8:14 pm

    @Irony Abounds:

    I just don’t like how this election is trending.

    The polling shows no discernible trend other than republicans coming home, as was expected.

  54. 54.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    October 31, 2016 at 8:14 pm

    @hovercraft: he sounds like a man who would like to hold a hearing….

    I guess I can cough up another hundred for the DSCC

    @MomSense: Just gonna link to that myself. I don’t think David Corn would be putting it out if he hadn’t checked it carefully

  55. 55.

    debbie

    October 31, 2016 at 8:16 pm

    @Mike J:

    Thanks. Didn’t realize that would paste in as a link.

  56. 56.

    Gin & Tonic

    October 31, 2016 at 8:16 pm

    @JPL:

    Why set up a server, and not use it for emails

    There are a million possible reasons.

  57. 57.

    hovercraft

    October 31, 2016 at 8:17 pm

    @p.a.:
    Nothing will damage him in the eyes of the deplorables. He is their savior, and they are willing to accept anything he says or does in order to install him in the presidency to take their country back from us.

  58. 58.

    Major Major Major Major

    October 31, 2016 at 8:21 pm

    @Gin & Tonic: why, just today I bought a server that I’m currently using for nothing!

  59. 59.

    Kay

    October 31, 2016 at 8:23 pm

    @MomSense:

    An FBI spokeswoman says, “Normally, we don’t talk about whether we are investigating anything.”

    Normally. Unless it’s Hillary Clinton. Then we’ll say anything to anyone.

  60. 60.

    Chris

    October 31, 2016 at 8:23 pm

    @Applejinx:

    I very much doubt if anyone but Trump is mole-ing for the Russians. Everyone else is simply operating on standard Washington rules – which is to say, if anyone’s guilty, it’s the Democrats. A lifetime of political biases like that is just too much for most people, either in the MSM or the FBI, to shed.

    Which makes them useful idiots for Putin, no doubt. To put it in 1930s terms, most of these people are the equivalent of the many idiots and assholes, both in Germany and further west, who turned a blind eye to fascism for so long because they were simply so obsessed with the “danger” posed by the left that they considered fascism to be, at worst, a distraction, and at best, a useful ally (maybe even an inspiration).

  61. 61.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 8:24 pm

    Just got home and, per Tom’s request, added my 2 cents worth.

  62. 62.

    Schlemazel

    October 31, 2016 at 8:25 pm

    I have mostly felt the Dem bed-wetters meme to be a bit over played but Jay-Zeus Crispy some of you are doing your darnedest to convince me it is accurate. Elections always tighten as the vote nears. We saw it in 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012. Chill the hell out. If you are that concerned go volunteer, make some phone calls, get out the vote.

    As has been mentioned many times around here GOtV is going to be key & the Clinton campaign has a very good one set up while Trump has Comey. We win.

  63. 63.

    Zinsky

    October 31, 2016 at 8:26 pm

    I don’t think Trump is some secret Commie or something. I think he thinks he is part of some super exclusive, hyper-macho, he-man, alpha male billionaires club where tough guys can press themselves up against women and grab ’em by the p*ssy and they damn well better like it! I’m sure the asshole thinks Putin is in the club too. Lets turn out in droves on Election Day and send this cretin back to his man-cave, soon to be bankrupted once and for all by sexual molestation and rape charges.

  64. 64.

    Schlemazel

    October 31, 2016 at 8:27 pm

    @Gin & Tonic:
    A mail server? What other reason than sending & receiving emails would you set up a mail server?

  65. 65.

    Baud

    October 31, 2016 at 8:27 pm

    @Schlemazel: Cut them some slack. They’re still in shock over Baud! 2016!

  66. 66.

    burnspbesq

    October 31, 2016 at 8:28 pm

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Trump was too cheap to do it right. They repurposed a server that had originally been set up to do email marketing.

  67. 67.

    Major Major Major Major

    October 31, 2016 at 8:30 pm

    @Schlemazel: you can basically use any server for anything. This is why for example the recent DNS attack came from DVR’s.

  68. 68.

    hueyplong

    October 31, 2016 at 8:30 pm

    I have upwards of 650,000 emails from the Ross campaign. Each and every one an invitation to influence peddling.

    Just saying.

    In the spring I was getting them from the Cruz campaign. Not sure who was in charge of their targeting, but that person wasn’t doing a bang-up job. I really enjoyed the growing sense of “This time it’s really Stalingrad for us.”

  69. 69.

    Amanda in the South Bay

    October 31, 2016 at 8:31 pm

    @Irony Abounds: And yet the polls aren’t showing much movement because of Comey. Calm the shit down.

  70. 70.

    hovercraft

    October 31, 2016 at 8:32 pm

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:
    New Hampshire

    RCP Average 10/17 – 10/30 — 47.2 45.4 Ayotte +1.8
    WMUR/UNH 10/26 – 10/30 641 LV 44 46 Hassan +2
    Emerson 10/23 – 10/25 600 LV 50 44 Ayotte +6
    Monmouth* 10/22 – 10/25 401 LV 46 46 Tie
    NBC/WSJ/Marist 10/20 – 10/24 768 LV 48 47 Ayotte +1
    UMass Amherst/WBZ* 10/17 – 10/21 772 LV 48 44 Ayotte +4

    Pennsylvania

    RCP Average 10/20 – 10/28 — — 44.3 42.3 McGinty +2.0
    CBS/YouGov 10/26 – 10/28 1091 LV 3.7 44 41 McGinty +3
    Emerson 10/25 – 10/26 550 LV 4.1 45 43 McGinty +2
    NY Times/Siena 10/23 – 10/25 824 LV 3.4 47 44 McGinty +3
    Morning Call 10/20 – 10/26 420 LV 5.5 41 41 Tie

    North Carolina

    RCP Average 10/20 – 10/28 — — 46.3 45.3 Burr +1.0
    CBS/YouGov 10/26 – 10/28 992 LV 4.1 44 44 Tie
    Emerson 10/26 – 10/27 650 LV 3.8 48 44 Burr +4
    NBC/WSJ/Marist 10/25 – 10/26 780 LV 3.5 48 48 Tie
    Gravis 10/25 – 10/26 1273 RV 2.8 45 48 Ross +3
    Quinnipiac 10/20 – 10/26 702 LV 3.7 48 47 Burr +1
    Monmouth* 10/20 – 10/23 402 LV 4.9 49 43 Burr +6
    PPP (D)* 10/21 – 10/22 875 LV 3.3 42 41 Burr +1
    NY Times/Siena 10/20 – 10/23 792 LV 3.5 46 47 Ross +1

    They are all close, the media has been saying since the bombshell broke last week that the voters will want divided government, I don’t see it yet. There may be some private polling showing it, but I think it’s just conventional wisdom since they started saying it Friday night before any polling. The race was tightening before Friday, which is normal, so we still have a chance. The only people I see splitting their tickets are republicans voting for Hillary, and I doubt they were going to vote for democrats down ballot anyway.

  71. 71.

    Ruckus

    October 31, 2016 at 8:32 pm

    @MomSense:
    Only one side of the political scene in this country prides itself on the rule of law, democratic process, and the peaceful transition of power. And it is the party to which you belong, not the one Burr belongs to.

  72. 72.

    Tazj

    October 31, 2016 at 8:32 pm

    @mkro: Yes, but few people in the media have made that point, Chris Hayes being a notable exception that I can think of. Someone wrote on their Twitter feed(can’t remember who) that this would be like if Woodward and Bernstein stood outside the break in and cheered. I guess much of the media doesn’t consider it a crime because it was only e-mails and not breaking into a building.

  73. 73.

    Miss Bianca

    October 31, 2016 at 8:34 pm

    @MomSense: “Senator Burr”, huh? Laughing about political assassination? No relation to Aaron, by chance?

    (sorry, just got done with some audio book excerpts of Chernow’s biography of Hamilton)

  74. 74.

    Gin & Tonic

    October 31, 2016 at 8:35 pm

    @Schlemazel: JPL said “server,” not “mail server.” Where do you see that anyone is talking about an SMTP server?

  75. 75.

    Mike J

    October 31, 2016 at 8:36 pm

    @Miss Bianca: I already said he wants to determine who lives, who dies, who tells your story.

  76. 76.

    Schlemazel

    October 31, 2016 at 8:37 pm

    @Major Major Major Major:
    No, the recent attacks from the IoT has noting to do with the devices intent. Yeas, you can set up a server to do anything you want but it makes no sense to set up a mail server & then not use it for email. They would have to be pretty stupid to do tha . . . oh, never mind. Understand though that you have to set up a server to be able to FTP files or serve web pages or provide chat services. If you wanted to use it for that one thing it makes no sense to go to the trouble of setting it up for other things. From a security standpoint it is down right stupid to enable a feature you are not going top use . . . but then I remember who we are dealing with.

  77. 77.

    Mike J

    October 31, 2016 at 8:37 pm

    BTW, the marketing firm that owned the server isn’t one i would trust,. They say n their web site that their CRM “supports All Data Systems and Transmission Methods”.

    All of them Katie?

  78. 78.

    Major Major Major Major

    October 31, 2016 at 8:39 pm

    @Schlemazel: from a security standpoint yes, but it’s trivial to open a port and implement one of the basic protocols.

    ETA: @Mike J: which port do you think pigeons use? What about WhiskerNet and cat packets?

  79. 79.

    ellie

    October 31, 2016 at 8:40 pm

    @Davis X. Machina: I was just here to post this. The Russians are blackmailing Trump! I can’t imagine what they have on him; the man has no shame or filter.

  80. 80.

    Mike J

    October 31, 2016 at 8:40 pm

    NYT has new leaked Trump tax docs.

  81. 81.

    Schlemazel

    October 31, 2016 at 8:40 pm

    @Gin & Tonic:
    It was in the original post.

  82. 82.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    October 31, 2016 at 8:40 pm

    @hovercraft: I think the idea of split ticket voting has a superficial appeal to tote-bagger types, people who think talking about “balanced budgets” “a check on Hillary” represent some kind of above-it-all political and intellectual sophistication. A small number of people, but like you say, these are tight races.

  83. 83.

    Schlemazel

    October 31, 2016 at 8:42 pm

    @Major Major Major Major:
    But why bother? I assume his people are lazy & underpaid, I don’t believe they would do anything they were not paid to do. Years ago when a windows server came with everything enabled they would have but not now.

  84. 84.

    BruceFromOhio

    October 31, 2016 at 8:45 pm

    @Mike J: Token ring! NetBIOS! Banyan VINES!

    Gaia, what a charlie foxtrot.

    ETA: I can understand a set of circumstances where you would want the idiot IT tech setting this up, because anyone smart enough to do it ‘right’ would have told you to fuck right the hell off, or blackmailed your sorry ass for mucho dinero.

  85. 85.

    jl

    October 31, 2016 at 8:46 pm

    Things start to look even fishier and stinkier with the HRC email BS. Josh Marshall claims on Twitter that somebody, who is not clear from Marshall’s tweet, testified that emails were sent to the computer in question. Though I read someplace Abedin said she did not know how the emails got there (maybe she forgot?) Anyway, the FBI knew that emails that might be relevant to the investigation were there.

    So, in a very important sense, if Marshall is correct, there is nothing new at all about these ‘newly’ discovered emails.

    I’m beginning to think that there may be some dirt comparable to Watergate going on here, but it isn’t anything from HRC’s end of the email non-scandal, which at this point is nothing more than political dirty tricks and a character assassination campaign. Aided and abetted by supposedly reliable, sober and responsible, straight-arrow GOP serious daddies.

    But maybe Marshall has gotten the testiimony mixed up. I find his tweet hard to believe, to be honest. Maybe someone following the dirty trick shenanigans can explain it to me.

    What doesnt add up. Interview shows her telling FBI she sent emails to this computer. Not much attempt to hide
    https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/793246755253018624

  86. 86.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    October 31, 2016 at 8:46 pm

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Not seeing your update on this post or in a new one. The same thing happened a night or two ago. Do you need to explicitly “republish” or something like that?

  87. 87.

    Mike J

    October 31, 2016 at 8:46 pm

    @Major Major Major Major: RFC 1149

  88. 88.

    Taylor

    October 31, 2016 at 8:46 pm

    Around the same time [September], the New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers began chasing the story. (They are still pursuing it.)

    Anybody want to bet Comey has asked the NYT to bury the story “so as not to jeopardize the investigation.”

    Still remembering how Keller and Sulzberger buried Risen’s explosive story on illegal wiretapping in 2004.

  89. 89.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    October 31, 2016 at 8:47 pm

    Jonathan Capehart ‏@ CapehartJ 2h2 hours ago
    Is Trump a Putin agent? “There’s absolutely no question,” said Evan McMullin.

  90. 90.

    Major Major Major Major

    October 31, 2016 at 8:47 pm

    @Schlemazel: I’m just assuming they’re idiots. Maybe they think “aha! If they aren’t looking for a ‘mail server’ they’ll never find us!”

    Maybe the scheme was cooked up by idiots and implemented by contractors who knew it was dumb but needed the money. I’ve been there.

  91. 91.

    Central Planning

    October 31, 2016 at 8:48 pm

    @BruceFromOhio: 100VGAnyLAN. Arcnet!

  92. 92.

    mike in dc

    October 31, 2016 at 8:49 pm

    Trump wrote off other people’s losses to avoid paying taxes

  93. 93.

    Central Planning

    October 31, 2016 at 8:49 pm

    @Mike J: African or European?

  94. 94.

    Davis X. Machina

    October 31, 2016 at 8:49 pm

    @Mike J: UUCP. And Kermit.

  95. 95.

    debbie

    October 31, 2016 at 8:50 pm

    @Steeplejack (phone):

    It shows up fine on my iPad.

  96. 96.

    BruceFromOhio

    October 31, 2016 at 8:50 pm

    @Central Planning: LOL.

    “Arcane communication protocols for 300 baud, please, Alex.”

  97. 97.

    dmsilev

    October 31, 2016 at 8:51 pm

    @Taylor: While they haven’t said anything about the Russian Connection, the Times did just go live with this: Trump’s Tax Dodge Stretched Law ‘Beyond Recognition’:

    But newly obtained documents show that in the early 1990s, as he scrambled to stave off financial ruin, Mr. Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would likely declare it improper if he were audited.

    Thanks to this one maneuver — which was later outlawed by Congress — Mr. Trump potentially escaped paying tens of millions of dollars in federal personal income taxes. It is impossible to know for sure because Mr. Trump has declined to release his tax returns, or even a summary of his returns, breaking a practice followed by every Republican and Democratic presidential candidate for more than four decades.

    Tax experts who reviewed the newly obtained documents for The New York Times said Mr. Trump’s tax avoidance maneuver, conjured from ambiguous provisions of highly technical tax court rulings, clearly pushed the edge of the envelope of what tax laws permitted at the time. “Whatever loophole existed was not ‘exploited’ here, but stretched beyond any recognition,” said Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center who helped draft tax legislation in the early 1990s.

  98. 98.

    Anoniminous

    October 31, 2016 at 8:51 pm

    @BruceFromOhio:

    Morse Code! Tolkien Ring!

    (aka “palantirs”)

  99. 99.

    Mike J

    October 31, 2016 at 8:51 pm

    @Central Planning: I’ve done some sales engineer work. Basically it means sitting in a room full of potential clients with a salesman who is trying to get a multi million dollar sale and coming up with some technologically plausible way that everything he’s saying is not a lie. It usually boils down to selling them more consulting hours to make it all work.

  100. 100.

    divF

    October 31, 2016 at 8:52 pm

    @BruceFromOhio:
    300 Baud ? One is plenty, thank you.

    Before they made Baud, they broke the mold. (/ Perlman)

  101. 101.

    Anoniminous

    October 31, 2016 at 8:52 pm

    @Central Planning:

    75 Baud RTTY or GTFO!

  102. 102.

    Gin & Tonic

    October 31, 2016 at 8:52 pm

    @Schlemazel: The trouble with articles on technical subjects written by non-technical people. I see nothing in the Slate article that definitively says that the trump1.contact-whatever.com was an actual mail server.

  103. 103.

    JPL

    October 31, 2016 at 8:53 pm

    @Gin & Tonic: The article stated it was set up as an email server.

  104. 104.

    Miss Bianca

    October 31, 2016 at 8:53 pm

    @Mike J: Missed it. I was trying to come up with a joke about not throwing away your shot, but alas, my wits are neither quick nor tasteless enough.

  105. 105.

    mike in dc

    October 31, 2016 at 8:54 pm

    I feel better now. The Trump hits are starting to come, like a gentle rain that becomes a torrential downpour.

  106. 106.

    Major Major Major Major

    October 31, 2016 at 8:54 pm

    @Mike J: haha I forgot about that

  107. 107.

    Central Planning

    October 31, 2016 at 8:54 pm

    @BruceFromOhio: What is x/y/zmodem?

  108. 108.

    Baud

    October 31, 2016 at 8:56 pm

    I am honored.

  109. 109.

    Central Planning

    October 31, 2016 at 8:56 pm

    @Anoniminous: LOL!

    I once interviewed at a company that had TCNS – Thomas Conrad Network System – which was a 100mbit version of Arcnet.

    And, we might as well throw in appletalk, IPX, DECNet, LAT, and MOP.

  110. 110.

    PPCLI

    October 31, 2016 at 8:56 pm

    @efgoldman: Also a former US Attorney and State Attorney General. I am amazed at just how widespread the horror at Comey’s action is from people who have been high government legal officials. When even Alberto “I Don’t Recallez” Gonzalez is saying your action was against long-standing principle, you know you are out of bounds.

  111. 111.

    Mike J

    October 31, 2016 at 8:57 pm

    @JPL: contact- client is a mass emailer. They keep a database of everyone who stays at your hotels and sends them spam. That was the original purpose of that server.

    My original guess was it was abandonware, somebody hacked it and was using it for their own purposes.

  112. 112.

    JPL

    October 31, 2016 at 8:57 pm

    @efgoldman: It would be cool to Whitehouse in the White House in 2024.. just sayin

  113. 113.

    mai naem mobile

    October 31, 2016 at 8:57 pm

    @jl: I would be wiling to bet the emails are a result of a back up. Ive done this myself. If Huma wanted to hide emails, she is not not going to check every single device in the house. Say what you want about the Clintonsame but they have a good record if hiring smart competent people.

  114. 114.

    Central Planning

    October 31, 2016 at 8:58 pm

    @Mike J: That’s what I do now. Sometimes I’ll say “What the account manager MEANT to say was…”

    I actually love my job, my customers, and my coworkers.

  115. 115.

    LurkerExtraordinaire

    October 31, 2016 at 8:58 pm

    @Miss Bianca: I think Aaron Burr only had one child and she died in a shipwreck. Her only child, a son, died a few months before his mother.

  116. 116.

    bago

    October 31, 2016 at 8:58 pm

    @Schlemazel: In the world of REST, everything is a server. Seriously, how do you think the Mirai botnet worked?

  117. 117.

    Peale

    October 31, 2016 at 8:59 pm

    @jl: Yep. I’m thinking the whole purpose of coming up with a reason to obtain all of the computers in the house was precisely to get that computer. Has Huma given an interview where she explained what was on that computer and claimed that she didn’t know things were there? I would find it strange if she did. She does have lawyers and it would be odd for them to tell her to try to give an explanation that way.

    I have no reason to defend Anthony Weiner. His online habits were a problem. But I am beginning to think he may have been set up here.

  118. 118.

    Cheryl Rofer

    October 31, 2016 at 8:59 pm

    On the Mother Jones article, the crucial sentence is

    It claimed that Russian intelligence had “compromised” Trump during his visits to Moscow and could “blackmail him.”

    Russia does this All. The. Time. Every trip to Russia for working with them on nuclear stuff after the fall of the Soviet Union, we were warned no messing around with attractive men/women. No shady currency deals. If you have any suspicions about an interaction, don’t do it.

    And we know Trump’s proclivities.

  119. 119.

    Miss Bianca

    October 31, 2016 at 9:00 pm

    @LurkerExtraordinaire: I was sort of joking. But only sort of.

  120. 120.

    MomSense

    October 31, 2016 at 9:01 pm

    @Kay:

    It really is astounding how this election has revealed the extent to which our institutions are biased in favor of Republicans.

  121. 121.

    GrandJury

    October 31, 2016 at 9:02 pm

    These are precisely the sorts of things that the NSA program of eavesdropping on metadata and making connections is supposed to be looking for. Hopefully they are on the case.

    If some of the scientists are the well connected people the story says they are, I’m sure they have at least made certain people aware of this. Would be nice if this story got more attention about now. Could easily keep the village idiots and tv bobbleheads occupied for another 8 days.

  122. 122.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    October 31, 2016 at 9:02 pm

    @Cheryl Rofer: that’s very interesting, ’cause that’s the part that seemed a little too Hollywood for me. And I understand you are a person of some expertise….

  123. 123.

    different-church-lady

    October 31, 2016 at 9:02 pm

    @jl:

    testified that emails were sent to the computer in question.

    E-mail does not get sent “to a computer.” It gets sent to an e-mail address. That address is hosted by an e-mail server. Your local computer or device retrieves mail from that server. That’s how the same messages can be on multiple devices.

    Perhaps a moot distinction — Marshall is a terribly sloppy writer, in my view.

  124. 124.

    Miss Bianca

    October 31, 2016 at 9:02 pm

    @Adam L Silverman: thank you, Adam. Once again, I’ve taken a weekend off from the Internet and found myself of a Monday evening going, “hunh?”!

  125. 125.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 9:02 pm

    @a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): No. Liz Mair has tweeted out that this is not the big drop. That she expects the Clinton supporting PAC that has it to drop it shortly and that she might do so, but she wants to watch Hillary burn for a little while longer (over the Comey thing).
    https://twitter.com/LizMair/status/793147336146972676

    Follow
    Liz Mair
    ‏@LizMair
    Dem SuperPAC sitting on one of two last big, bad rounds of Trump oppo should drop it now rather than defending HRC on emails. #justsaying

    https://twitter.com/LizMair/status/793142637993848832

    Follow

    Liz Mair
    ‏@LizMair
    Oh yes, all the reporters want me to spill the beans about that remaining Trump oppo, and I might, but fun to watch Clinton burn awhile.

    https://twitter.com/LizMair/status/793255071190552577

    Follow

    Liz Mair
    ‏@LizMair
    Fuck it, I’ll just say it. Someone should be digging harder into NDAs that certain women have allegedly signed benefiting Trump.

    I’m pretty sure if you asked her to pick a cartoon/comic book character avatar it would be either Harley Quinn from Batman or the Comedian from The Watchmen.

  126. 126.

    MomSense

    October 31, 2016 at 9:03 pm

    @Cheryl Rofer:

    I think we are are all on the same wavelength.

  127. 127.

    Central Planning

    October 31, 2016 at 9:04 pm

    @Anoniminous: My first modem was 300 baud. One of my buddies pulled it out of a Compuserve box for me. I still have my CIS account number tattooed in my brain.

    If anyone wants to be a real computer pedant, look up what baud means. baud != bps in most cases.

  128. 128.

    Hkedi

    October 31, 2016 at 9:04 pm

    ALOHAnet Packet Radio!

  129. 129.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    October 31, 2016 at 9:04 pm

    @Adam: Wouldn’t the purpose of the server exchanges be immaterial, since the existence of the connection itself contradicts Trump’s “I’ve got nothing to do with Russia” declarations? Which he’s made many times, forcefully.

  130. 130.

    Cheryl Rofer

    October 31, 2016 at 9:04 pm

    The Mother Jones article is here.

    And now there’s another about Trump’s Russia ties. It appears that the FBI is investigating.

  131. 131.

    bago

    October 31, 2016 at 9:05 pm

    @bago: Even ya gat-damned toothbrush!

  132. 132.

    LurkerExtraordinaire

    October 31, 2016 at 9:06 pm

    @Miss Bianca: lol….sorry.

    *goes back to lurking.*

  133. 133.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    October 31, 2016 at 9:06 pm

    @Adam L Silverman: she might do so, but she wants to watch Hillary burn for a little while longer

    I always say there’s something about Liz Mair that scares me. It’s in her eyes. She has the eyes Quint described on a shark in Jaws.

  134. 134.

    different-church-lady

    October 31, 2016 at 9:06 pm

    @Cheryl Rofer: I would think if Trump slept with a Soviet agent he would have already boasted about it by now.

  135. 135.

    GrandJury

    October 31, 2016 at 9:06 pm

    @debbie: Nice.

    They really are on the ball. This story should be a winner but I gave up trying to figure out what the media idiots would find interesting after pu$$ygate drowned out the Russian ties story last time it came up.

  136. 136.

    Cheryl Rofer

    October 31, 2016 at 9:06 pm

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: I mostly went to Estonia and Kazakhstan. But the warnings were given, every trip.

  137. 137.

    Central Planning

    October 31, 2016 at 9:06 pm

    @Hkedi: Thicknet, thinnet, AUI!

    Since it’s Halloween: Vampire Taps.

  138. 138.

    Baud

    October 31, 2016 at 9:07 pm

    @Cheryl Rofer: Holy cow. I think I guessed underage Russian girls in a comment a while ago.

  139. 139.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    October 31, 2016 at 9:07 pm

    @different-church-lady: maybe she has pictures of little trump, next to the smallest nesting doll for scale

  140. 140.

    Miss Bianca

    October 31, 2016 at 9:07 pm

    @Adam L Silverman: sorry, but who the fuck is Liz Mair?

  141. 141.

    LurkerExtraordinaire

    October 31, 2016 at 9:09 pm

    Man, these motherfuckers really want their President Pence. Hope it blows up in their damn faces.

    Okay, really now, back to the shadows….

  142. 142.

    Major Major Major Major

    October 31, 2016 at 9:09 pm

    @Miss Bianca: republican operative, #nevertrump

  143. 143.

    dmsilev

    October 31, 2016 at 9:09 pm

    @Miss Bianca: Republican campaign apparatchik. I’m not sure off-hand which of the 16 Dwarves she worked for this cycle, but she really doesn’t like Trump (or Clinton either, for that matter).

  144. 144.

    jl

    October 31, 2016 at 9:09 pm

    @different-church-lady: What you say is true, for the sending. But not always for archiving email, which sometimes may be pointed to a particular device, or back-up, as Peale pointed out. So, yes, Marshall was sloppy in his tweet, and i was sloppy in my understanding of his tweet.

    But, bottom line seems to be that the FBI had testimony on the existence of these emails on some server, or fact that they were archived or backed-up to this device. So, things get ever murkier and suspicious, IMHO.

  145. 145.

    Omnes Omnibus

    October 31, 2016 at 9:10 pm

    @Miss Bianca: Liz Mair.

  146. 146.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 9:10 pm

    @Steeplejack (phone): Not that I’m aware of. Its showing for me on my laptop and iPad.

  147. 147.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    October 31, 2016 at 9:10 pm

    @Adam L Silverman: The character avatar stuff is out of my wheelhouse, but I’m guessing it’s maybe related to the J,FL “her eyes” observation.

  148. 148.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    October 31, 2016 at 9:10 pm

    @debbie:

    Are you using the desktop or mobile version of the site? I’m using mobile, and it’s still not showing up.

  149. 149.

    hueyplong

    October 31, 2016 at 9:10 pm

    Seems only fitting for the “kill shot” to the Trump campaign to come from a female, and especially from a former Trump spouse (though being tagged by history as a Russian Stooge would probably do a better job of killing off future earning potential).

  150. 150.

    Cheryl Rofer

    October 31, 2016 at 9:11 pm

    @Baud: Bingo

  151. 151.

    SiubhanDuinne

    October 31, 2016 at 9:11 pm

    @JPL:

    It would be cool to Whitehouse in the White House in 2024.

    It would. As long as he doesn’t appoint Gov. Foggybottom as Secretary of State.

  152. 152.

    Miss Bianca

    October 31, 2016 at 9:12 pm

    @LurkerExtraordinaire: you need not…go back to lurking.

    Not by my pretty floral bonnet, anyway!

  153. 153.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 9:13 pm

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: No a number of foreign powers, including some of our allies and partners, all try to do the same thing.

  154. 154.

    Howard Beale IV

    October 31, 2016 at 9:14 pm

    Let’s not forget that Richard Burt, who is Trump’s foreign policy adisor, has been critical of NATO and sits on the boards of Alfa Bank (!) and an investment fund with heavy investments in Gazprom.

  155. 155.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 9:15 pm

    @a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): To a point.

  156. 156.

    Baud

    October 31, 2016 at 9:15 pm

    This whole election makes me think there is a glitch in the Matrix.

  157. 157.

    MikeBoyScout

    October 31, 2016 at 9:15 pm

    Regardless of the veracity of the Slate piece, Russia has spent very little to great effect to undermine the integrity of the American democratic process here and abroad.
    It helps Russia to have so many Republicans aiding and abetting.

  158. 158.

    Omnes Omnibus

    October 31, 2016 at 9:15 pm

    @Miss Bianca: You forgot the lurker protocol. First be nice and sucker them into commenting regularly. Then viciously turn on them.

  159. 159.

    Miss Bianca

    October 31, 2016 at 9:16 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: She sounds like a contrarian asshole. Or, in other words…

  160. 160.

    trollhattan

    October 31, 2016 at 9:16 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Almost two weeks later, on August 4, she called Trump a “loudmouthed dick” in an interview with CNN anchor Anderson Cooper and tweeted about it afterwards, to widespread approval from other users of the social media platform.

    Heh.

  161. 161.

    Miss Bianca

    October 31, 2016 at 9:18 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: I only go vicious on trolls! LE has *never* trolled, so far as I am aware!

  162. 162.

    hovercraft

    October 31, 2016 at 9:18 pm

    @efgoldman:
    I would totally love to see that, enough of these fucking republicans screwing over the democratic presidents who nominate them. If you have to nominate a couple, give them something they can’t fuck up. Then again I can’t think of anywhere they wouldn’t screw up, just give them a few Ambassadorships to Fiji, and Mauritius.

  163. 163.

    Major Major Major Major

    October 31, 2016 at 9:18 pm

    @Howard Beale IV: shit, really?

  164. 164.

    jl

    October 31, 2016 at 9:18 pm

    @Baud:

    ” This whole election makes me think there is a glitch in the Matrix. ”

    Even the super genius Krell had to do a firmware patch.

  165. 165.

    Anoniminous

    October 31, 2016 at 9:19 pm

    @Central Planning:

    Compuserve! Lordy, lordy. That takes me back. We had a 300 baud acoustic coupler to hook-up with them and thought we were the bee’s knees when we shifted to a Hayes 4800 baud(!) and then a few months later to 9600 BAUD!

    gah-zowies

  166. 166.

    Peale

    October 31, 2016 at 9:20 pm

    @MikeBoyScout: It really isn’t a marriage of convenience. They travel. They see how wealthy the Russian Oligarchs are and one wealthy person is interchangeable with another as far as their concerned. They are actually probably a little jealous of the power of they princes in China and the kleptogarchs in Russia. They don’t buy penthouses. They buy skyscrapers to live in, don’t ya know.

  167. 167.

    Kay

    October 31, 2016 at 9:20 pm

    @MomSense:

    Hah! He noticed it too:

    Matthew Miller ‏@matthewamiller 39m39 minutes ago
    Back in pre-Comey days when I was a DOJ spokesman, we didn’t have to begin this sentence with “normally.”

    So funny. It is LIT-ER-ALLY the “Clinton Rules”

  168. 168.

    Kathleen

    October 31, 2016 at 9:21 pm

    @Chris: I would also add industrialists’ attempted coup in the early years of FDR’s administration. They approached Smedley Butler to be the front man. Smedley blew the whistle to Congress.

  169. 169.

    PPCLI

    October 31, 2016 at 9:21 pm

    @efgoldman: Yes. And hopefully he can clean house in the NY office. Maybe put a few agents under oath to determine who has been leaking information about ongoing investigations. Chaffetz too.

  170. 170.

    srv

    October 31, 2016 at 9:22 pm

    During the first Obama term, Fridman and Aven met with officials in the White House on two occasions, according to visitor logs.

    OMG. Proof that Obama is the real Eleanor Iselin behind all if this. It’s why he appointed Comey in the first place.

  171. 171.

    PsiFighter37

    October 31, 2016 at 9:23 pm

    @Adam L Silverman: Someone should tell David fucking Brock and Peter fucking Daou how to properly leak a story, then.

    I’m sure there some sort of strategery involved, but these last 168 hours of this godforsaken election are going to rattle my nerves.

  172. 172.

    Bennett

    October 31, 2016 at 9:23 pm

    Tom and Adam:
    One question to ask of the NYT & of its reporters with whom you are in contact is why has NYT not had even one story about Trump and the Jewish vote? They have done such a story for every other presidential election, Especially because Trump’s candidacy attracts so many anti-Semites.

  173. 173.

    Baud

    October 31, 2016 at 9:23 pm

    @Kay: That’s great. Glad to see who’s speaking out.

  174. 174.

    Miss Bianca

    October 31, 2016 at 9:25 pm

    @Anoniminous: we seem to have skipped over Baud!2016! altogether!

  175. 175.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 9:25 pm

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: I’m never quite sure if she’s chaotic neutral or chaotic evil, but I’m pretty sure chaotic is involved here!

  176. 176.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 9:26 pm

    @Miss Bianca: She’s a GOP/Conservative strategist and campaigning professional.

  177. 177.

    Mary G

    October 31, 2016 at 9:26 pm

    @PPCLI: Polygraphs for all?!

  178. 178.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    October 31, 2016 at 9:26 pm

    @Baud: @Kay: Matthew Miller on the Maddow show right now

  179. 179.

    Baud

    October 31, 2016 at 9:27 pm

    What’s with all these GOP operatives who know about bombshell info that wasn’t used in the primary.

  180. 180.

    frosty

    October 31, 2016 at 9:28 pm

    @Anoniminous: Semaphore!

  181. 181.

    Major Major Major Major

    October 31, 2016 at 9:28 pm

    @Adam L Silverman: I wanna say they got rid of chaotic neutral…

    ETA: just realized y’all would probably make a great tabletop group.

  182. 182.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 9:28 pm

    @a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
    Harley Quinn:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harley_Quinn

    Rorschach:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_(comics)

  183. 183.

    Jeffro

    October 31, 2016 at 9:29 pm

    @PsiFighter37:

    As for the Clinton oppo team – now is the time to start emptying the cartridge on Trump.

    Yes indeed…she needs to let fly with all of it, now, yesterday. I think she’s a heavy favorite to win, but we need the Senate blue too, and then we need to spend, oh, the first four years of Hillary’s administration thoroughly investigating every last corrupt Russian connection to the Trump campaign.

    We can spend the second four years on other things. Priorities, people.

  184. 184.

    JJ

    October 31, 2016 at 9:30 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: I’ve suspected this and have been waiting for my first smackdown in order to know I’m really welcome.

  185. 185.

    Central Planning

    October 31, 2016 at 9:30 pm

    @Miss Bianca: Baud!2016! never seemed to gain much traction. Not really compatible with anything else.

  186. 186.

    PPCLI

    October 31, 2016 at 9:30 pm

    @Mary G: Naw, Polygraphs don’t work with people who know they aren’t actually “lie detectors” as FBI agents surely do. Waterboarding, on the other hand…. OK, it doesn’t give reliable information either, but perhaps we should try it just to be sure…

  187. 187.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 9:32 pm

    @Kathleen: And Congress, apparently according to a set of secret protocols that always seem to be active, basically did nothing other than hold a few committee hearings. Pissed Maj. Gen. Butler off.

  188. 188.

    Steeplejack

    October 31, 2016 at 9:32 pm

    @Adam L Silverman, @Steeplejack (phone):

    Just confirmed that Adam’s update does not appear on the mobile version of the site. I can see it on the desktop version on my computer, but on my Android phone and Android tablet the update doesn’t show up, either by (a) refreshing the page, (b) deleting the page and reopening a new version from the previous post or (c) deleting the page and opening a new version from the main page.

    I will send Alain a message about this, but it’s something to keep in mind going forward.

  189. 189.

    Central Planning

    October 31, 2016 at 9:34 pm

    @Steeplejack: Doesn’t show up on Chrome for MacOS either. Skips right to TaMara’s post.

  190. 190.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 9:34 pm

    @PsiFighter37: My understanding, and I’m not a campaign professional (and don’t play one on TV, radio, stage, and/or the Internet) is that if its that big you want to dump it late Thursday afternoon in time for the evening news cycle. It then dominates from then through election day and drives down turnout.

  191. 191.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    October 31, 2016 at 9:34 pm

    @Jeffro: oh, the first four years of Hillary’s administration thoroughly investigating every last corrupt Russian connection to the Trump campaign.

    I said upthread, or last thread, or in a thread, Sheldon Whitehouse sounded like a man who wanted answers, and I’d like him to have some subpoena power. I really would like to know how much contact there has been between FBI agents and officials the Chaffetz committee

    (I am in full campaign addict mode– I had a very unproductive day today)

  192. 192.

    Miss Bianca

    October 31, 2016 at 9:35 pm

    @Adam L Silverman: and evil/perverse clown, apparently. The universe apparently thinks we need more of them. Le sigh.

  193. 193.

    catclub

    October 31, 2016 at 9:35 pm

    @Central Planning: IP via carrier pigeons

  194. 194.

    hovercraft

    October 31, 2016 at 9:35 pm

    @Miss Bianca:
    She is a contrarian asshole, here she is being one to Boris Epstien (sic)

  195. 195.

    Citizen_X

    October 31, 2016 at 9:36 pm

    @Baud:

    This whole election makes me think there is a glitch in the Matrix.

    It makes me think this game is poorly written. I mean, how can this “Trump” character be real? Come on!

  196. 196.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    October 31, 2016 at 9:36 pm

    @mkro:

    Instead, the media just keep reporting on Wikileaks’ daily dump and not following the trail, doing the hard work that Bernstein and Woodward did.

    To be fair the Plumbers were such idiots they delivered the story to Bernstien and Woodward on a silver platter.

  197. 197.

    Major Major Major Major

    October 31, 2016 at 9:36 pm

    My lefty friends on Facebook are now sharing articles about how President Hillary has already sold us out (she’s worse than obama and we all know who he’s worse than) by not promising to use her magical dictator powers to block the Dakota pipeline.

  198. 198.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 9:37 pm

    @Bennett: For the record: I’m not in touch with any NY Times reporters. In fact the last reporter I was in touch with was Lindsay Beyerstein when I did an episode of her show dealing with what was going on in Iraq and Syria about 2 years ago. The only other reporter I’ve even spoken with is one of the guy’s in the dojo in NY at a seminar 18 months ago. He’s a senior economics/business reporter at WSJ and all we talked about was how each of us was doing and how his daughter and wife were.

  199. 199.

    MikeBoyScout

    October 31, 2016 at 9:37 pm

    @Adam L Silverman: Bingo!

  200. 200.

    Kathleen

    October 31, 2016 at 9:37 pm

    @Hkedi: I’m so old I worked in a group that supported X25 “Packet Switching” (my group assigned NTN’s). Good times. Also, too, bps – byts per second – could be synch or asynch. I never quite grasped that concept.

  201. 201.

    patroclus

    October 31, 2016 at 9:38 pm

    For the first time ever, the Human Rights Campaign has de-endorsed a candidate. After Mark Kirk’s racist comments in the recent debate against Tammy Duckworth, the HRC said “No Puppet. No Puppet. You’re the Puppet” to Kirk and has now endorsed gay-friendly Tammy Duckworth. We’re gonna do it! Kirk is toast – stick a fork in him.

  202. 202.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    October 31, 2016 at 9:38 pm

    More Liz Mair:

    Liz Mair ‏@ LizMair 40m40 minutes ago
    Just do your fucking jobs, reporters. And Dems, if you can’t do the necessary to get the story written, then you deserve to lose to him.

    The Russia stuff is important. The taxes stuff is interesting. But it’s not as big ticket as at least one other big thing out there.

    Fuck it, I’ll just say it. Someone should be digging harder into NDAs that certain women have allegedly signed benefiting Trump.

    She seems to be implying this thing is common knowledge in the political world. If she knows it, and Rick Wilson knows it, and if Dems know it, how the hell does the press not know it?

  203. 203.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 9:38 pm

    @Major Major Major Major: I haven’t looked at anything even resembling D&D, or other role playing games, since I was about 13. So I have no idea about what the categories are today.

  204. 204.

    Major Major Major Major

    October 31, 2016 at 9:40 pm

    @Adam L Silverman: well excuuuuse me. Mister too cool for dnd over here.

  205. 205.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    October 31, 2016 at 9:40 pm

    @mike in dc: November Rain.

  206. 206.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 9:41 pm

    @JJ: Have you considered bringing up your compound or camp?

  207. 207.

    different-church-lady

    October 31, 2016 at 9:41 pm

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: I believe the common saying ends with, “…when his salary depends on him not knowing it.”

  208. 208.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 9:42 pm

    @Steeplejack: Thanks, I’ll follow up with him as well.

  209. 209.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 9:42 pm

    @Central Planning: I’m on Chrome for MacOS and there’s no issues here.

  210. 210.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 9:43 pm

    @hovercraft: I have no problem with that.

  211. 211.

    Steeplejack (tablet)

    October 31, 2016 at 9:44 pm

    @different-church-lady:

    Not if she was a sex-trafficked 14-year-old.

  212. 212.

    JJ

    October 31, 2016 at 9:45 pm

    @Major Major Major Major: I have those assholes in my feed too; I encourage kitten gifs for a week- some of them can hear that. Also, the “check-in’s” from there blew up this am from about 9 to 1. Incredible.

  213. 213.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 9:45 pm

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: They may know it. There’s a difference between journalists knowing something and being willing to report it out.

  214. 214.

    JR in WV

    October 31, 2016 at 9:46 pm

    @debbie:

    There is a bare link in your pasted text. That’s why you went into moderation.

  215. 215.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 9:47 pm

    @Major Major Major Major: I’m not saying I’m too cool for it, just saying I’ve had other things to do since 1983. I have no problem with table top, online, or LARP gamers. As long as I don’t have to dodge a local recreation of the Battle of Verdun while trying to take my dogs to the park.

  216. 216.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    October 31, 2016 at 9:47 pm

    @Adam L Silverman: hmmm…. and that’s the “figure out how to get it written” part? NDAs, women… fear of a Trump lawsuit?

  217. 217.

    geg6

    October 31, 2016 at 9:47 pm

    @Steeplejack:

    Works fine on Apple products.

  218. 218.

    Kathleen

    October 31, 2016 at 9:47 pm

    @Adam L Silverman: I remember reading that reporting of Butler’s testimony fizzled out quietly. I would like to read more about those hearings and what happened. Butler was a fascinating man.

  219. 219.

    Steeplejack (tablet)

    October 31, 2016 at 9:48 pm

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Using which version of the site—desktop or mobile?

  220. 220.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 9:48 pm

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: Just doesn’t fit their narrative of the campaign and candidates. As well as their actual roles as an institutional player in American politics.

  221. 221.

    Central Planning

    October 31, 2016 at 9:49 pm

    @Kathleen: Nice. I worked for a company that had an X25 WAN, mostly for connections to LatAm IIRC. Also frame relay for backup. More acronyms… PPP and HDLC :)

  222. 222.

    Taylor

    October 31, 2016 at 9:51 pm

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    She seems to be implying this thing is common knowledge in the political world. If she knows it, and Rick Wilson knows it, and if Dems know it, how the hell does the press not know it?

    One thing we learned from the Fitzgerald investigations is that our national media loves being “in the in crowd” and has secondary interest at best in sharing their insider information with the plebs.

    Essentially they are a bunch of small-minded village gossips.

  223. 223.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 9:52 pm

    @Steeplejack (tablet): I have the desktop up in Chrome on my MacBook Pro – so desktop. On my iPad I always switch to desktop as I don’t like mobile themes.

  224. 224.

    Major Major Major Major

    October 31, 2016 at 9:54 pm

    @JJ: more people had checked in at Standing Rock than live in North Dakota by 10am Pacific. And of course the whole thing turned out to be a hoax. Buncha kids cosplaying Arab Spring

  225. 225.

    OldDave

    October 31, 2016 at 9:59 pm

    @Mike J:

    RFC 1149

    Curses. Teach me to be outside greeting Trick or Treaters. Otherwise I would have beat you to it.

  226. 226.

    retiredeng

    October 31, 2016 at 9:59 pm

    @Carlo Graziani: So, apparently, with our doofus FBI and the Russian boy geniuses, I see it as the “Keystone Cops” against “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight”. How reassuring.

  227. 227.

    Steeplejack (tablet)

    October 31, 2016 at 9:59 pm

    @Central Planning:

    Adam’s update is in this post, just below Tom’s cutline for the picture he used. Did you look there? And which version of the site are you using?

  228. 228.

    Omnes Omnibus

    October 31, 2016 at 10:02 pm

    @Steeplejack (tablet): The call is coming from inside the house?

  229. 229.

    Baud

    October 31, 2016 at 10:04 pm

    @Steeplejack (tablet): No update on chrome Android

  230. 230.

    Steeplejack (tablet)

    October 31, 2016 at 10:05 pm

    @geg6:

    What version of the site are you using, desktop or mobile?

  231. 231.

    JJ

    October 31, 2016 at 10:05 pm

    @Adam L Silverman: Good one ! Thanks

  232. 232.

    LurkerExtraordinaire

    October 31, 2016 at 10:07 pm

    @Miss Bianca: lol, no, I have never the time nor creativity to troll. Usually, I just read all you super smart people’s comments and learn a ton of shit.

    Plus I have a fucking thesis to write BUT THIS ELECTION IS DRIVING ME INSANE. After Nov. 8th I need to step away from the Internet for a bit. But only until the election data starts to really come out!

    I might have a problem. Okay, for realsies, back to lurking.

  233. 233.

    Steeplejack (tablet)

    October 31, 2016 at 10:08 pm

    @Adam L Silverman:

    As I said, I believe the problem is with the mobile version of the site.

  234. 234.

    Steeplejack (tablet)

    October 31, 2016 at 10:09 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Yes. For some values of “house.”

  235. 235.

    Ruviana

    October 31, 2016 at 10:11 pm

    @Taylor: Which makes your comment another edition of What Digby Said.

  236. 236.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 10:12 pm

    @JJ: Always happy to help!

  237. 237.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 10:13 pm

    @Steeplejack (tablet): I highly recommend reading this site while not moving. Helps prevent motion sickness.//

    I’ll let Alain know.

  238. 238.

    SFBayAreaGal

    October 31, 2016 at 10:13 pm

    For some reason I’m not seeing the update by Adam on my Android. Is the updaye in the comments or on the front page?

  239. 239.

    Omnes Omnibus

    October 31, 2016 at 10:26 pm

    @JJ: Would a quick “Fuck you. You are a fucking idiot!” make you feel at home?

  240. 240.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 10:27 pm

    @SFBayAreaGal: Front page. Its part of Tom’s post, just below where his material ends. There’s a large, bold face UPDATE just above what I added.

  241. 241.

    JR in WV

    October 31, 2016 at 10:27 pm

    @Cheryl Rofer:

    Video we may see right after the election, if Trump loses!!

    See The Donald and his exciting and stimulating [(fill in the blank – what does Trump like most?)] with beautiful [( who does The Donald like to do this with?)] in this exciting new live-action video from Putinskiyonivitch Film Studios~!!!

  242. 242.

    Steeplejack (tablet)

    October 31, 2016 at 10:29 pm

    @SFBayAreaGal:

    It’s under the cutline identifying the picture Tom used, but it doesn’t show up in the mobile version of the site.

  243. 243.

    Steeplejack (tablet)

    October 31, 2016 at 10:32 pm

    @Adam L Silverman:

    You can’t see it on the front page either in the mobile version of the site. You get one paragraph of each post, then a link to “read this post.”

  244. 244.

    JJ

    October 31, 2016 at 10:33 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: (blush) No fuck you!

  245. 245.

    Omnes Omnibus

    October 31, 2016 at 10:41 pm

    @JJ: Welcome to the Dark Side.

  246. 246.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 31, 2016 at 10:41 pm

    @Steeplejack (tablet): Okay.

  247. 247.

    Gin & Tonic

    October 31, 2016 at 10:47 pm

    Kinda late, but there are quite a few (very) technical people on Twitter saying there’s no there there wrt the Slate story, and that at least one of the sources is saying he was misquoted.

  248. 248.

    Howard Beale IV

    October 31, 2016 at 10:48 pm

    @Major Major Major Major: No shit.

  249. 249.

    JR in WV

    October 31, 2016 at 10:49 pm

    @Anoniminous:

    I had a 300 baud acoustic coupler at first. My first computer was a 64K device with a 9 inch green screen… it had one 5 inch floppy for the program and one for the data, and a daisy-wheel printer that used a carbon ribbon, output looked good. It cost nearly $4000 in 1984, I used it to customize resumes to job openings. Got a job, so it paid for itself in just a couple of months. I still have the museum piece… CP/M OS…

    Can anyone guess the name?

    Wife had a RadioShack “laptop” with a 4 line 80 column display, BUILT IN MODEM !!! It was the company’s tool, and they had techs to reload the OS as needed. State of the Art!

  250. 250.

    Steeplejack (tablet)

    October 31, 2016 at 10:57 pm

    @JR in WV:

    Compaq Portable? No, that ran MS-DOS. What was still running CP/M in 1984?

    And the Model 100 the missus had was adopted early by sports reporters, who had tight deadlines after night games.

  251. 251.

    JR in WV

    October 31, 2016 at 11:02 pm

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Bunker, or no Bunker? That is the question!!!

  252. 252.

    JR in WV

    October 31, 2016 at 11:06 pm

    @OldDave:

    Token Ring, anyone? and if a card started repeating, the whole ring was down until a tech could find the bad card… so sad! Such a bad idea, wonder why anyone ever bought a second license.

  253. 253.

    JR in WV

    October 31, 2016 at 11:11 pm

    @Steeplejack (tablet):

    Before Compaq there was KayPro. 44 Pounds of portable. But so off topic, so I deleted the post in a fit. Close though. And yes, the Model 100.

    A friend saw it in the car, and typed in a Basic program, Print “Hello World” and then couldn’t stop it. Even turning it off and restarting it, just Hello World – line-feed over and over. Mrs had to ask a tech to fix it, he reloaded the machine, not being a programmer. She was a reporter… loved it.

  254. 254.

    JerryN

    October 31, 2016 at 11:31 pm

    @Gin & Tonic: I spent a little time surfing some sites and twitter feeds, since the Slate article seemed a little off to me (a lot of glossing over of why certain plausible alternatives were eliminated, general fuzziness of non-tech writer interpreting highly technical info, etc.) and yeah, probably no there there. Best that I can figure is that the Trump server did start out life primarily set up for outbound marketing emails. At some point it was probably put behind a firewall that cut it off from most public connections but the IP range that included the Alfa Bank servers was open. Why the firewall was configured that way is an interesting question that probably deserves some attention, but I digress. Once behind the firewall, there are several explanations for the traffic. 1 – it was still sending email blasts, but the only connection open was to Alfa Bank. 2 – the connection got pwned as was being used as a proxy server and was being used for some flavor of exploits. 3 – There was authorized private email traffic between the servers. This traffic could just as easily be business related as political, we don’t know enough about Trump’s finances to say one way or the other.

  255. 255.

    JR in WV

    October 31, 2016 at 11:35 pm

    Wasn’t Compaq more big in 1989 or so? Trying to relate jobs and contract dates to machines on desks…

  256. 256.

    SFBayAreaGal

    October 31, 2016 at 11:37 pm

    FYI, update does not show up on my mobile.

  257. 257.

    JerryN

    October 31, 2016 at 11:41 pm

    Also, just saw this on twitter that claims the Trump server was an outbound spam server that blocked inbound requests. If the Alfa servers tried to ping back for verification that would explain the traffic. It doesn’t explain why there was almost no other outbound traffic, however.

  258. 258.

    debbie

    October 31, 2016 at 11:54 pm

    @Steeplejack (phone):

    Sorry, the sugar high wore off and I fell asleep. As you likely know, I’m on the desktop version.

  259. 259.

    sukabi

    November 1, 2016 at 12:00 am

    @different-church-lady: not if they didn’t survive the encounter…or if person was a child.

  260. 260.

    Steeplejack (tablet)

    November 1, 2016 at 12:18 am

    @JR in WV:

    IBM PC hit in 1981, and the clones came soon after. Compaq, Epson, etc.

  261. 261.

    HootMN

    November 1, 2016 at 1:23 am

    “And that connection runs two ways and based on what the technical subject matter experts indicate that two way connection is for the purpose of electronic communication.”

    I’ve set up many such connections, and since DNS is a potential point of failure I always use fixed IP addresses for routine configurations and scripts. These are not fly-by-night organizations, so a deliberate communication setup, especially one that was desired to be “secretive,” would have used fixed IPs to connect(or a different method entirely). They would not be dependent on DNS if basic competence was being employed. The logs most likely just show dross, which happens all of the time with large organizations.

  262. 262.

    Central Planning

    November 1, 2016 at 5:19 am

    @Adam L Silverman: @Steeplejack (tablet): I know this thread is probably dead, but when I saw the comment about Adam throwing in his 2 cents, I figured that was a new post, not an edit to this one. I hadn’t gone back up to the top of the post and scrolled down and noticed it. Sorry for the confusion!

  263. 263.

    Central Planning

    November 1, 2016 at 5:20 am

    @JR in WV: Wasn’t CP/M from Digital?

    My first computer (mom was able to borrow from school) was a Commodore Pet – green screen, tape drive. Had to type in programs with my brother to play games like Dungeon. Good times.

  264. 264.

    Uncle Cosmo

    November 1, 2016 at 8:48 am

    @Cheryl Rofer: Severely late to the thread, I know, but FWIW, in something like 40 vacation trips to Europe, I’ve been approached by “ladies of the evening” exactly twice, on successive nights, about a week before 9/11, in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, by ethnic Russians. Although I kinda doubt it had to do with anything beyond making a living. (It’s probably not for nothing that in 1990s Istanbul a widely-used term for a prostitute was “Natasha”. Times were tough.)

  265. 265.

    Chris

    November 1, 2016 at 10:32 am

    @Kathleen:

    @Chris: I would also add industrialists’ attempted coup in the early years of FDR’s administration. They approached Smedley Butler to be the front man. Smedley blew the whistle to Congress.

    Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve always found that coup to be as bizarre and improbable as any number of JFK conspiracy theories. Smedley Butler was a radical, outspoken critic of capitalism and Wall Street and their hold on the U.S. political system. For a cabal of business interests trying to take over the government to rely on him as the leader of their conspiracy is as absurd as if the Koch brothers decided to bankroll an Elizabeth Warren run for the White House.

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