Clinton Campaign: OMG Donald Trump had a Server Too!

In late July, one of these scientists—who asked to be referred to as Tea Leaves, a pseudonym that would protect his relationship with the networks and banks that employ him to sift their data—found what looked like malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain had Trump in its name, which of course attracted Tea Leaves’ attention. But his discovery of the data was pure happenstance—a surprising needle in a large haystack of DNS lookups on his screen. “I have an outlier here that connects to Russia in a strange way,” he wrote in his notes. He couldn’t quite figure it out at first. But what he saw was a bank in Moscow that kept irregularly pinging a server registered to the Trump Organization on Fifth Avenue.

More data was needed, so he began carefully keeping logs of the Trump server’s DNS activity. As he collected the logs, he would circulate them in periodic batches to colleagues in the cybersecurity world. Six of them began scrutinizing them for clues.

[…]

The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn’t the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation—conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.

To Slate’s credit, this is a piece that took a while to write. Getting this many sources together, doing the research behind the info here. If I had to guess, the writer was definitely handed the basic info sometime in the last couple of months, but it took a while to reach out and find the people needed to get this piece together. It does not look like a mere response to the FBI’s reopening of the investigation.

However, any attempt to equivocate this to Hillary Clinton’s email server is ridiculous. Donald Trump may be using questionable business ethics at the very worst, but nothing here really indicates he’s breaking any sort of law. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, broke laws in her mishandling of classified information and her putting said intelligence at risk. That John Podesta and others are pushing this seems to indicate… they don’t have a whole lot left, maybe? I dunno. It seems really, really weak on their part.

Plus, you’re keeping the conversation on Hillary’s own email problems, right? “Look, Donald Trump did it, too!” is… still admitting she did it. That’s not going to help your problems, is it? That’s only going to keep your problems in the news cycle, too.

Maybe they’ve got something else coming. I don’t know. But, you’re a week out from the elections now, and a solid chunk of the country has already voted. If you’ve got something else, now’s the time to really let it fly.