Two years ago, I wrote about a mysterious series of computer contacts between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, one of the most powerful financial institutions in Russia. For four months, during the summer before the 2016 Presidential election, two servers registered to the bank repeatedly looked up the address of another server, maintained by a mass-marketing firm for the Trump Organization. Thousands of these lookups, which typically precede communication, appeared in logs of the Domain Name System, a global database of online addresses; the traffic was noted by a group of prominent computer scientists with unusual access to those records. But the D.N.S. traces were inconclusive and required sophisticated analysis. The Trump Organization and Alfa Bank denied that they had been communicating at all, and the episode remained a mystery.
Since then, Alfa Bank’s lawyers in the United States have carried out an aggressive campaign to uncover the identity of the sources who gathered the D.N.S. logs, filing lawsuits and serving subpoenas on some of America’s leading computer experts, some of whom helped decipher the logs for The New Yorker. Two lawsuits—filed against “John Doe et al.,” the unidentified scientists who discovered the seeming evidence of communication—claim, without offering evidence, that malicious people doctored the data, in an effort to smear Alfa Bank and the Trump campaign.
Remarkably, Alfa Bank’s legal efforts are proceeding in parallel with the Justice Department and its allies in the conservative press, who have waged a relentless campaign against American intelligence and the F.B.I. for what they describe as a malign effort to concoct a false story about Russia’s efforts to help Trump in 2016. In recent weeks, scientists and others quoted in my story have been summoned to testify to a grand jury impanelled by John Durham, the U.S. attorney appointed by Attorney General William Barr to investigate potential criminal conduct in the Russia probe. It is unclear whether lawyers for the Justice Department and Alfa Bank are working together, but they share an interest in pursuing people who have investigated Trump’s ties to Russia. “There’s a unity of purpose,” one lawyer involved in the litigation told me.
Alfa Bank’s relationship with Trump is opaque, and official documents resulting from a series of investigations and counter-investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election offer few decisive conclusions. In the special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report, Petr Aven, the chairman of Alfa Bank, testified that he tried, at Putin’s suggestion, to open a private channel to the incoming Trump Administration. Mueller’s report didn’t mention the Alfa Bank data, but one issued this summer by the Senate Intelligence Committee did. It said that, although investigators did not conclude that the data necessarily reflected communication, they also “could not positively determine an intent or purpose that would explain the unusual activity”; it added that the explanations offered by Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization “were not consistent.” In 2019, an inspector general examining the origins of Mueller’s investigation wrote, “The FBI investigated whether there were cyber links between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, but had concluded by early February 2017 that there were no such links.” An American official who helped investigate Russian interference confirmed that the F.B.I. had looked at the data, with help from outside analysts, but said that its efforts were not extensive.
A different American official, who deals regularly with national-security issues, told me he believes that the F.B.I. and other intelligence agencies never thoroughly investigated the computer traffic—in part, he suspected, because U.S. officials may have been wary of revealing how they had collected the data. “This evidence is very tangible and real,” the official said. “It seems possible that the U.S. government decided not to pursue this because it did not want to expose an important source and method for intelligence gathering.”
Alfa Bank’s suits against “John Doe” are being handled in part by Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, one of the country’s largest law firms. In 2018, a Skadden lawyer named Alex van der Zwaan pleaded guilty to lying to investigators looking into Russian interference in the 2016 election; he is the son-in-law of German Khan, one of Alfa Bank’s founders.
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.
Alfa Bank’s lawyers maintain that the operation was carried out by “a well-trained and well-funded group that existed before the cyberattacks committed against Alfa Bank, continues to exist today, and carries out cyberattacks against a range of targets.” The group’s goal, they say, was “polarizing the U.S. public by pitting the predominant political parties against one another.” If the bank’s lawyers are right, the plot was extraordinarily abstruse. In their telling, sophisticated operatives used their computer expertise to create a cryptic and hard-to-prove appearance of connection between a Russian bank and a marketing firm linked (but not closely linked) to Trump; they had the foresight to set up this hoax and carry it out months before the first news stories inquiring into Trump’s connections with Russia. Alfa Bank appears to believe that a computer scientist whom I spoke to for my piece in 2018, and identified as “Max,” helped to carry out the plot. In our interviews, he rejected the idea of falsified data, saying, “If we were going to lie, then we would have made up a much better story than this!” Max, who describes himself as a Republican, gave a strikingly different account of his motivations: he and a group of like-minded scientists had noticed the unusual traffic as they investigated whether Russian agents were trying to hack prominent Republicans, as they had hacked prominent Democrats.
Another computer scientist, who identified himself as “Tea Leaves,” gave similar interviews for a Slate story, from 2016, about the communications; Alfa Bank’s lawyers apparently believe that he is also among the alleged conspirators. To uncover the identities of Max and Tea Leaves, the lawyers have served subpoenas on many of the scientists who reviewed D.N.S. records for The New Yorker, including Steven Bellovin, of Columbia University; Jean Camp, of the University of Indiana; and Daniel Kahn Gillmor, of the A.C.L.U. Alfa Bank’s lawyers have indicated in court documents that they also intend to subpoena the records of the Democracy Integrity Project, a nonprofit run by Daniel Jones, a former investigator for the Senate Intelligence Committee who helped decipher the D.N.S. records.
The subpoenas demand access to the scientists’ computer data, phone logs, and e-mail records, along with any information they may have about Max or Tea Leaves. None of the scientists I interviewed in 2018 claimed to know the identities of the people who discovered the unusual communications; when I reached out to them recently, they declined to speak to me. But other computer-science experts told me that they were angry about the legal action. One suggested that Alfa Bank’s lawyers were mounting an assault on academic freedom. Another, Randy Bush, said, “They are trying to intimidate people.” Bush told me that he never closely studied the data and knows nothing about who found it.
Alfa Bank may also be using less formal methods to discover the identities of the people involved in the story. Last year, Daniel Hoffman, a former Moscow station chief for the C.I.A., requested a meeting with me, during which he asked me to introduce him to Max. Hoffman neglected to mention that he is a member of the advisory board for B.G.R., Alfa Bank’s lobbying firm in Washington. (Hoffman said later that he wanted to interview Max for a news story that he planned to write.) This year, Alfa Bank commissioned a New York-based production company to make a documentary film intended to “understand what really happened.” A researcher for the company asked me and Jones, the former Senate Intelligence Committee investigator, to talk about what we had learned. The documentary was never made.
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.)
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.
The Alfa Bank case has also become an object of interest for federal agents working for John Durham, the prosecutor appointed by Barr. Durham’s agents have summoned some of the same computer scientists to testify before a grand jury, and are asking for the same material that Alfa Bank is seeking. (They’ve asked Jones, the investigator, to testify as well.) Some agents told scientists that they were exploring a potential criminal charge—presumably against Max and Tea Leaves—for giving false information to the government. A number of those called to testify are seeking to quash the subpoenas, and it’s not apparent that anyone has testified so far.
There is no clear evidence that the Justice Department and Alfa Bank are working together, but some people involved in the case noted a striking alignment of purpose. “There’s a heck of a lot of mutual interest,” William Taylor, an attorney for Jones, told me.
More troubling is that the cases could aid the Kremlin. Although Aven has disputed reports that he is close to Putin, he told investigators for the Mueller report that he meets with the Russian President quarterly and receives what the report describes as “implicit directives.” In a court filing, Fusion’s lawyer, Joshua A. Levy, accused Alfa Bank of engaging in a “treacherous game”: using the U.S. court system to uncover covert methods used by American intelligence agencies. “Exposing these sensitive law enforcement methods to our enemies, including but not limited to the Russian government, would harm all of us,” Levy wrote. (Alfa Bank has denied the accusation.)
The lawsuits appear to be receiving some unusual assistance from senior Republican leaders. In July, Barr took the extraordinary step of declassifying investigators’ interview notes with a secret source for the Steele dossier. The source was interviewed by American intelligence officials in 2017, in part because they had also used him as a trusted source. The decision to make his testimony public was driven by Barr’s conviction that the Trump-Russia probe was launched by partisan officials working for the “deep state.”
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.”
