The Russian-Trump bank connection is one of the bogus stories in the Russian collusion hoax

John Solomon:

If Democrats and their media accomplices keep recycling it, the unproven Donald Trump-Alfa Bank conspiracy may one day live right up there with the extra JFK gunman at Dallas’ grassy knoll, the missing Oak Island treasure, or the Lost City of Atlantis.

After all, the best unsolved mysteries — especially in politics — are those that can be neither proven nor disproven.

And therein lies the travesty of the unrelenting, yet uncorroborated, allegation that Trump’s campaign set up a covert communication system with Russia during the 2016 election, using a computer server in the United States and another owned by a Russian bank.

This allegation first surfaced with a Hillary Clinton-loving computer nerd in the fall of 2016, who claimed her group obtained domain name server (DNS) logs showing frequent “pings,” or contacts, between a server owned by Russia’s Alfa Bank and one in the name of the Trump Organization.

It turns out, though, that the server wasn’t actually in the Trump Organization in New York. It was in a tiny Pennsylvania town. And it actually wasn’t controlled by the Trump Organization but, rather, by an independent email marketing firm once hired by the president’s company.

But, for now, we won’t let those facts get in the way a good yarn. Plus, there are some interesting characters to follow.

Christopher Steele — the Trump-hating former British spy hired by opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was hired by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic Party to dig up Trump dirt in Russia — was next to pick up the allegation. Eventually, allegations of connections between Alfa Bank’s parent-company Alfa Group, Russia and Trump made it into the dossier that Steele gave the FBI, although his grasp of the information was so shoddy that he misspelled the bank’s name.

Next, the allegation surfaced in a Slate and a New York Times article just a few days before Trump was elected. (Perhaps appropriately, the stories ran on Halloween.) The Times’s story, however, conceded the FBI was dubious of the whole matter.

Not to be outdone, private attorney Michael Sussman walked in similar allegations to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker in September 2016, according to four congressional sources familiar with testimony and documents gathered in the Russia case. The evidence of the connections to the Alfa Bank allegations also are in a footnote in the House Intelligence Committee report, where Sussman's name was redacted by the FBI. Congressional investigators are investigating whether someone in Sussman’s firm, Perkins Coie, also provided Russia-related information to the CIA in early 2017.

That’s significant because Perkins Coie’s clients included the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and that firm paid Fusion GPS for Steele’s dirt-digging. Sussman declined to say, through a spokesman, if he met with a CIA contact but insisted any contact the firm may have had with the CIA wasn’t done at the behest of the DNC or Clinton.Still, it is hard to ignore his political connections.

And if that wasn’t enough to pressure the FBI to look at the allegation, Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson — Steele’s boss on the Trump research project — brought the Alfa allegations directly to the No. 4 Justice Department official in December 2016. Assistant Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr’s notes from the meeting have a nifty notation. “The New York Times story on Oct. 31 downplaying the connection between Alfa servers and the Trump campaign was incorrect,” Ohr wrote in quoting Simpson. “There was communication and it wasn’t spam.”
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Some in the media are still pushing this bogus story despite the judgment of the FBI that it has no substance.  It appears to be part of the ongoing Russian hoax operation by the left in this country trying to undermine the President.  At its heart, it makes no sense.  But if you are a conspiracist it is a reed to clutch to your bosom.