Thread by @ErrataRob

1/ I finally got around to debunking that Daniel Jones report on the AlfaBank-Trump affair mentioned by @briankrebs.

The most important debunking is Finding #5, as it clearly shows the nature of conspiracy-theory.
blog.erratasec.com/2021/10/debunk…

2/ The Wikipedia defines "conspiracy-theory" thusly. It's an unsatisfying definition because much of the time, there is no alternate explanation.

That's why I use the definition "when the lack of an alternate explanation is claimed as proof of the conspiracy".

3/ In this case, the NYTimes contacted AlfaBank on Sept 21, 2016, and two days later, the domain name (mail1.trump-email.com) disappeared.

This is too much of a coincidence to happen just by chance. As the Jones report describes it:

4/ Five years ago when I was debunking this, reporters would grill me on this, demanding that I come up with another explanation. I couldn't. I could only point out that there could be lots of unknown explanations.

5/ There was good reason to doubt the conspiracy-theory. There was no direct connection between the Trump Org and the domain name. It was created by marketing firm "Cendyn" when Trump Hotels was a customer, and hosted on Cendyn servers.

6/ Cendyn creates domain names like this for customers: hyatt-email.com, denihan-email.com, mjh-email.com, and so on.

But Trump ceased being a customer in March 2016, so eventually Cendyn would get around to removing the name from their DNS servers.

7/ But now 5 years later, with the Durham indictment and leaks of Strzok text messages we find out what really happened.

The FBI called Cendyn on the morning of Sept 23 and asked about the domain. The agent's text message was:

8/ The coincidental timing is that the Democrat operative (Sussman) contacted both the NYTimes and the FBI at around the same time, who in turn sent out queries.

It's the FBI query to Cendyn that caused the deletion, not the NYTimes query to AlfaBank.

9/ The point of this thread is that for 5 years people didn't have an alternate explanation. The only explanation that fit was the conspiracy. Thus, it was seen as confirming the conspiracy-theory.

10/ The point of this thread is recognizing something is a conspiracy-theory before you know the correct answer, going back 5 years and being able to recognize then that while you can't explain the coincidental timing, it's not evidence confirming the conspiracy-theory.

11/ The explanation of the NYTimes-AlfaBank-TrumpOrg chain of events wasn't an explanation because it created more questions than it answered, namely, the fact that the TrumpOrg didn't control the name, Cendyn did.

12/ For that to work, we now need to believe there's some super-secret business relationship that continues between TrumpOrg and Cendyn despite their overt public relationship with Trump Hotels being canceled.

13/ That's a lot of people at both Trump Org and Cendyn who somehow have kept their silence on this conspiracy for all this time. There are endless unresolved questions.

12/ Conversely, the correct explanation doesn't have such holes. Cendyn served the name on their DNS servers, had dissolved the business contract with TrumpOrg months before, and when the FBI called, noticed the name should be removed, and did so.

13/ The point is, we can recognize conspiracy-theories as being conspiracy-theories even when we can't come up with any alternate explanation.