Like I said, the DeVos family pulls a lot of strings and has a lot of influence with their money, but my point was: to say that he “led” Spectrum health is incorrect (even as board chair) and that the DeVos family “owned” Spectrum is also incorrect. That’s all. No need to stretch stories for this family and administration, when there’s so much batshit insane stuff right there in the truth. Fighting ignorance and all that.
The point, for the purposes of this thread is that Trump Tower’s mystery server, like Donald Trump’s friends, the DeVos family, is directly connected to Spectrum Health.
Just goes to show you. When you have a reputation for high-mindedness, for honesty in your private and public life, for transparency in your relationships…people might hear a story like this and easily shrug it off or expect a good reason for it. When your whole life has been devoted to building an edifice of lies, thuggery, bullying, skulduggery, illegal business dealings and failure to keep your promises…well, then, something like this is just more fuel for the funeral byre, or, at least, the march to the 2018 polls. Thrump, and most of the Republicans who support him, are only worthy of being trampled into the ground.
Good article by CNN. Note it correctly refrains from saying the server was in the Trump Tower (it notes the server was located in a data center in Pennsylvania). Stupid detail I know, but it still grates me as a nerd when people add these blatantly wrong facts to their conspiracies.
There is no possible logical explanation for this. My conclusion: somebody planted those faked DNS queries (spoofed IP addresses and all) in order to try and manufacture a Trump scandal.
Yeah, that’s probably it. And when Erik Prince was in the Seychelles trying to set up a back channel for Vlad & Donald, they probably just wanted to swap Pokemon.
You don’t think it’s significant that CNN exaggerated Mr. DeVos’ role?
No, because I don’t think CNN really exaggerated Dick DeVos’ role, either in Spectrum, where’s he’s a permanent trustee board member (with a hospital named after his mom,) or in Donald’s repeated attempts to evade US intelligence by establishing private party lines to Vladimir Putin.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration on CNN’s part to call De Vos a leader of Spectrum Health, given that I quoted the CEO of Spectrum describing De Vos as a “valuable and committed leader” on the occasion of his (De Vos’) election as chairman of the board of trustees.
The son-in-law of the founder of Alfa bank was arrested by Mueller’s team today for, in part, not turning over September 2016 emails to the investigators.
I am sure this is purely coincidental to the events detailed in this thread, many of which also occurred in September 2016.
Plenty of scandal among Trump and his pals, but the fake Trump Tower secret server ain’t one.
(I read your link. It was about the 2012 Scadden report fallout, which is a Manafort scandal. Not much to do with Trump, as such, except for his poor judgment in hiring Manafort.)
I’m not taking a position on Trump’s scandals. I’m taking a position on people presenting plainly false statements about tech that I understand.
It now seems the basic facts of this scandal were not even true.
Turns out those two secret machines, Alfa and Spectrum Health, were not the only ones making the DNS requests after all, as had been stated (and which I thought was not possible). Plus, the requests happened continuously over a long period of time, not on a few specific occasions.
This site shows some purported DNS logs. I took a quick peek with awk|sort|uniq showing that one set indeed has only Alfa and Spectrum, but another one has those two along with others. (Which is the correct one?) In all cases they show continuous traffic over a four month period.
This account says another researcher found more than 19 requesters. It also mentions and debunks some further plainly false scandal embellishments, like the Spectrum machine being a Tor node (hey, who made that up?) Plus they have actual samples of spam sent with the offending Trump domain name.
There was no secret communication between Trump and Alfa Bank. It was open communication with many parties, resulting from Trump’s email contractor sending out ordinary business email spam to contacts all over the world.
Whatever one believes about Trump scandals, this one’s fake.
I am quite fine in conceding your overall point of your expertise and technical analysis of the server(s), but the fact remains that neither of us can attest to what the intentions were of the people who (a) set it/them up, or (b) sent emails. Even the Intercept gets this, however obliquely:
(Obliquely: Such a grand claim that this server has NOTHING to do with Trump/Russia also carries a high burden of proof. Which, in fact, is the standard of this Board.)
Admitting that Trump is a walking scandal which affects his pals and then declaring this server had absolutely nothing to do with Trump’s “issues” with Russia is, well, inconsistent. At best we can both agree that, frankly, not enough is yet known to either damn or exonerate and that this merely shows the toxicity of being, however remotely, associated with Donald J Trump.
Okay, I see where I declared that.
You’re right, I got carried away. We don’t have much info about what that Trump server did. We have no communication logs or disk contents or list of running processes. We have no proof that it WASN’T a secret Trump/Russia communications channel.
What we have is people deliberately distorting what little info there is, and making blatantly false claims about it.
Well, saying the smoke in Trump tower may be tied to the conflagration in the White House isn’t exactly “blatantly making a false claim.”
I meant the blatantly false statements about what some technical detail or another means (“That’s a Tor exit node!”). I can’t find the original .xyz mirror anymore to find examples, but anyway whole thing has now turned out to be one giant false claim (“Eighty-seven percent of the DNS lookups involved the two Alfa Bank servers!”) so it’s really just one big scam.
In followup:
- The FBI does seem to have legitimately ruled out the Trump server connection, according to Horowitz.
- Accusations against Alfa Bank were first brought up directly by Hillary Clinton’s people and given directly to Steele to investigate.
- That all said, Mueller did confirm that Eric Prince and Steve Bannon had some weird, mystery meeting with one of the heads of Alfa in the Seychelles.
logically wouldn’t you want to choose the incompetent one so that LESS evil actually gets accomplished?
The story that will never die…
John Durham indicted a lawyer for making false representations to the FBI as to who he represented regarding statements made regarding the Alfa bank server, ergo, this server issue got tossed back in the news a few weeks ago:
It’s a pretty lame indictment, will likely not even see a jury, and was done just so Durham could show that he was doing something.
The problem is that Durham spun a narrative about how everything came about, this narrative really adding very little to the substance of the indictment… akin to if you were indicted for jaywalking but the indictment spun a theory about how you conspired to jaywalk w/o charging you for it. Part of Durhams narrative was that the researchers concluded that nothing was afoot, but their voices were ignored.
Indictment here, PDF: https://www.justice.gov/sco/press-release/file/1433511/download
Well…
In this bizarre rant, Durham mentioned the researchers via ‘code’ (ala ‘Researcher 1’, ‘Researcher 2’), … but the code identifying the researchers was easily broken and they (the researchers) have been receiving death threats from the usual fuckwit Trumpy’s… so they responded yesterday with a letter sent to Garland and Durham, discussed on Maddow: