50 The MSM’s No Collusion Canard: Phillip Bump’s Fittingly Savvy Piece on Alpha Server
UPDATE: Regarding the Alpha Server story typical recent savvy MSM piece gloating that it’s a fitting bookend to the end of the Russia probe.
In reality whatever the truth of the Alpha server story what is really fitting is Bump’s snarky dismissal of ‘the Russian probe’-while Barr later ran into criticism for his fake exoneration letter, the pundits never adjusted their erroneous narrative that Mueller said No Collusion.
One of the themes of the past few years has been that the complexity of the Internet, something intentionally left opaque to the user, generates a lot of activity that can be posited as nefarious.”
Very true-Bump and his savvy friends destroyed Clinton’s Presidential campaign over just such a canard-the Emailgate canard.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-contested-afterlife-of-the-trump-alfa-bank-story
“The suits were filed separately in Pennsylvania and Florida, where the businesses that managed the servers linked to the Trump Organization were situated. The filings charge that a group of unknown persons “executed a highly sophisticated cyberattacking scheme to fabricate apparent communications.” The suits say that the attackers used a method known as spoofing, in which they sent e-mails made to look as if they were from the Trump Organization to Alfa Bank, whose servers responded by looking up addresses for the sender. These attackers, the suits contend, alerted other scientists to this spurious evidence of communication, and the scientists tipped off the press.”
Yet Bump manages to as Jerry Seinfeld would say yadda yadda yadda the most interesting part-that the scientists actually believed the communications were disguised to look like it was just with Trump Organization.
“Alfa Bank’s principals—Aven, Khan, and a man named Mikhail Fridman—are personally suing Fusion GPS, a research firm in Washington that had hired Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent, to investigate Donald Trump’s relationships in Russia before the 2016 election. The dossier that Steele assembled claimed that Aven and Fridman had been close confidants of Vladimir Putin since he was the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, in the nineteen-nineties, when they sent him “large amounts of illicit cash.” Steele has been criticized for sloppy tradecraft, but much of the information he recorded has been neither proved nor disproved. Aven, Khan, and Fridman say that information in the dossier about the bank and its principals is false and defamatory. They have sued Steele, as well as Buzzfeed, which first published the dossier. They also served a subpoena on Jones, the investigator, asking for all his correspondence with Fusion. (Alfa Bank has also sought to subpoena Fusion’s executives, in connection with the John Doe lawsuits.)”
Although-Aven did admit that Putin asked him to setup a back channel with the Trump Russia House
In any case, Aven and his Alpha Bank friends have the right judge for their atrocious lawsuit indeed the man many call the worst judge in Washington
It’s very simple. While Chris Darden didn’t want to admit it he and Marcia Clark lost the OJ Simpson case when the jury was selected-and included nine black women.
FN: This is the conjecture of none other than the juror who gave the Black power salute after OJ was acquitted
Similarly once the Supreme Court took up Bush v. Gore, Bush’s-wrongful-elevation was a fait accompli. And just so, Aven and his fellow Alpha Bank lawyers seem assured of success with such a blatantly Republican leaning judge.
For those defending themselves against the lawsuits, their attorneys’ power of discovery would give them extraordinary access to Alfa Bank’s records. But Aven, Khan, and Fridman claim that they do not control their own documents at the bank and cannot produce them. (Public records show that together they control more than sixty per cent of the bank.) The three men also say that they are not public figures, and are therefore entitled to stronger protections against defamation. They made a similar argument in a U.S. court two decades ago, and it was thrown out. But the federal judge presiding over their Fusion libel case, Richard Leon, has allowed it so far, and so the suit is likely to drag on—a situation that Aven, Khan, and Fridman can afford more easily than the founders of Fusion can. According to Forbes, the three bankers are believed to have a combined net worth of about thirty billion dollars. “They could spend a million dollars a day on this and not even notice,” the lawyer involved in one of the cases said
Talk about poisoned fruit
The source’s identity was blacked out of the notes. But, when Barr declassified the document, Senator Lindsey Graham immediately posted it to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Web site, adding, “I want to thank Attorney General Barr for releasing these documents and allowing the American people to judge for themselves.” Within days, a pro-Trump blogger, claiming to have pieced together clues contained in the notes, revealed the source’s identity: Igor Danchenko, a Russian-American political analyst in Washington, D.C.
Danchenko is now at risk. Agents of the Russian state have killed such informants: in 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former F.S.B. officer who was investigating links between Putin and organized crime, died in London after ingesting polonium that was slipped into his drink.
About two weeks after Danchenko’s unmasking, he received a subpoena from Alfa Bank. “Is Igor Danchenko worried?” his lawyer, Mark E. Schamel, said. “Yes. He fears for his life.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/us/politics/trump-alfa-bank-indictment.html
“Six weeks later, after Slate ran a lengthy article about the Alfa Bank suspicions, the Clinton campaign pounced. Mrs. Clinton’s Twitter feed linked to the article and ran an image stating the suspicions as fact, declaring, “It’s time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia.”
Exactly-whatever the truth about the Alpha Bank server story this was-and remains true, as Mueller failed to ask Trump. So Hillary was right-yet the MSM still suggests she was wrong. What else is new?
I’m struggling with this:
Whatever caused the odd data, at issue in the wake of the indictment is whether Mr. Joffe and the other three computer scientists considered their own theory dubious and yet cynically went forward anyway, as Mr. Durham suggests, or whether they truly believed the data was alarming and put forward their hypothesis in good faith.
I mean is the implication that if anyone tweets a story they know is bunk an indictable federal offense? If so there is probably no Republican politician in the country who won’t be in a jail cell soon.
How exactly do they propose to get inside the heads of anyone who tweeted the Alpha server story and conclusively decide if they believed what they were tweeting or not?
https://www.businessinsider.com/alfa-bank-trump-organization-link-remains-mystery-after-durham-indictment-2021-10