Thread by @dcpoll

Was there a connection between Russia's Alfa Bank and Trump's Campaign?
The Trump domain was shut down after @nytimes contacted Alfa Bank. “That shows a human interaction...Alfa Bank alerted Trump Org, which shut it down.”
cc @ljean by @NewYorker #Maddow bit.ly/2zUExlf

DNS traffic between Russia's Alfa Bank and Trump Tower coincided with Manafort’s time as campaign chair and continued after he left. "It could have been a messaging system" using Webmail to facilitate secret communications via 'foldering,' a method favored by Manafort.
#Maddow

Prominent computer expert @ljean says the Alfa Bank-Trump Tower communication may have been used to coordinate the movement of data. Cambridge Analytica stole millions Facebook records, which could have been transferred to the Russian govt to guide US voter targeting.
#Maddow

Other than Russia's Alfa Bank, only one other entity was pinging Trump Org’s domain with any frequency: Spectrum Health, run by Erik Prince's brother in-law, Richard DeVos, husband of Trump's Sec of Ed, Betsy DeVos and heir to Amway, whose most important market is Russia.
#Maddow

ICYMI in JUN 2016: Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman and his fellow Alfa Bank founders [Petr Aven and German Khan, whose son in-law Alex van der Zwaan worked for Manafort and was indicted by Mueller] to invest millions in American Health Care.
#Maddow

https://twitter.com/dcpoll/status/853267314321625088

Richard Burt, who helped write Trump’s Apr 2016 Mayflower Hotel foreign-policy speech and hosted a series of foreign-policy dinners for Trump campaign advisor Jeff Sessions beginning in Jun 2016, is a "longtime associate" of Alfa Bank's founders.
#Maddow

https://twitter.com/dcpoll/status/875433881373204480

In Sep 2016, the FBI asked @EricLichtblau to delay his Alfa Bank-Trump story as it might jeopardize their Russian election interference probe. @nytimes agreed and on Oct 30, ran a false version of his story instead: "Investigating Trump, FBI sees no clear link to Russia”
#Maddow

The same day @nytimes ran its false Trump-Alfa Bank story, @Slate ran @FranklinFoer's story that made a detailed case of a covert Trump-Alfa link: 2 days after NYTs delivered potential evidence to Alfa's DC lobbying firm, BGR, the Trump domain vanished from the Internet.
#Maddow

On Jan 20, 2017, NYT's ombudsman @spaydl criticized NYT’s handling of Trump-Russia stories [including @EricLichtblau's Alfa Bank story] and praised @Slate for publishing @FranklinFoer's aggressive piece. She was later fired & Lichtblau resigned.
#Maddow

https://twitter.com/dcpoll/status/1049365769501532160

Alfa Bank-Trump Tower communications in 2016 may have been to coordinate the transfer of stolen Facebook profiles between Cambridge Analytica & the Russian govt to guide US voter targeting.
•➤ CA had a "research" project in Russia by then.
@ljean #Maddow

https://twitter.com/dcpoll/status/1042947580420911104

https://twitter.com/dcpoll/status/1042943200099491846

Alfa Bank hired cybersecurity firm Stroz Friedberg to review the data. In Jun 2017 Trump nominated as DOJ criminal division chief, Brian Benczkowski, a lawyer who oversaw Stroz Friedberg's investigation for Alfa, which he claims, "found no link between Trump & Alfa Bank.”
#Maddow

READ this piece by @FranklinFoer whose original reporting on Alfa Bank communicating with Trump Towers servers was spot on.

https://twitter.com/FranklinFoer/status/1049466275397799936