The Contested Afterlife of the Trump-Alfa Bank Story

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.