Another Excellent Article
Emails Show Researchers Who Alleged Trump Links To Russian Alfa Bank Were Anti-Trump
By: Margot Cleveland November 17, 2021
Part 1 of 3
“Do the f-cking alfa bank secret comms story, it is hugely important,” Fusion GPS’s Peter Fritsch pushed a media contact in the final weeks before the November 2016 general election, according to emails obtained by an open records request. “Call David Dagon at Georgia tech,” Fritsch would then insist when the Reuters News investigative reporter countered that the problem with the story was an inability to authenticate the data.
While Dagon may have been an expert in the data crunching, emails recently obtained by The Federalist from Georgia Tech reveal Dagon was something more—he was an anti-Trump, Russia-collusion conspiracy theorist.
Dagon’s name first became connected with the Alfa Bank story when Special Counsel John Durham indicted Michael Sussmann two months ago, charging the Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer with lying to FBI General Counsel James Baker.
What the Indictment Says about the Alfa Bank Story
According to the indictment, when Sussmann met with Baker on September 19, 2016, and provided the top FBI lawyer with “white papers” and data files purporting to establish a secret communications channel between the Trump organization and the now famous Russia-connected Alfa Bank, Sussmann falsely claimed he was not there on behalf of a client. In truth, though, Sussmann was working both for the Clinton campaign and an unnamed “U.S. technology industry executive,” the indictment charged.
The 27-page speaking indictment then detailed the origins of the Alfa Bank story. In July 2016, a computer researcher, using the moniker “Tea Leaves” and referred to in the Sussmann indictment as “Originator-1,” “had assembled purported DNS data reflecting apparent DNS lookups between Russian Bank-1 and an email domain, ‘mail1.trump-email.com.” “Tea Leaves,” a business associate of Tech-Executive 1, shared her information with Tech-Executive 1 and others, with Tech-Executive 1 alerting Sussmann to the data.
According to the indictment, Tech Executive-1 later “exploited his access to non-public data at multiple Internet companies to conduct opposition research concerning Trump,” and enlisted “the assistance of researchers at a U.S.-based university who were receiving and analyzing Internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract.”
The indictment further alleged that in early August 2016, “Tech Executive-1 directed and caused employees of two companies in which he had an ownership interest,” “to search and analyze their holdings of public and non-public internet data for derogatory information on Trump.” He also “tasked originator-1 and two computer researchers (‘Researcher-1’ and ‘Research-2’) who worked at a U.S.-based university (‘University-1’) to search broadly through Internet data for any information about Trump’s potential ties to Russia.” Among the data searched, the indictment alleged, was data Tech-Executive 1 had provided to Originator-1, Researcher-1, and Researcher-2.
Tech Executive 1 had provided the researchers access to that data to allow them to establish “proof of concept” for work they were seeking to perform under a government contract, which was eventually awarded in November 2016. Some of the data the university accessed from Tech-Executive 1’s internet company during this “proof of concept” stage included data the company had access to because it was a “sub-contractor in a sensitive relationship between the U.S. government and another company.”
While the data was provided to allow the researchers to protect U.S. networks from cyberattacks, according to the indictment, Originator-1, Researcher-1, and Researcher 2 also exploited the “data to assist Tech Executive-1 in his efforts to conduct research concerning Trump’s potential ties to Russia,” including the allegations about the secret communication channel between Trump’s organizations and Alfa Bank….
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https://thefederalist.com/2021/11/17/emails-show-researchers-who-alleged-trump-links-to-russian-alfa-bank-were-anti-trump/