It does, yeah, hence the "to communicate" bit, i.e. it doesn't make sense for him to use such a server for, I don't even know, back channel $3cret communications or something.

In case people haven't noticed, when Trump wants to talk to the Russians, his approach tends to be to send an aide to speak to them directly. He's not down with the cybers at all. The idea that he has some 7D chess cyber back channel going on doesn't pass the laugh test.

And yet the server is there and there are no explanations of what it's doing. Why don't we wait and see if anyone figures out what is going on? It would be nice to know why a server of Trump's, who has no Russian connections at all, trust him, would be configured with the IP address of a Russian bank.

This happened to a large degree about 100 years ago with the great migration. Police would go to train stations and arrest any black people who looked like they might be leaving.

One of the great ironies of ethno-nationalist regimes is the extent to which they rely on the persecuted minority de jour to keep their states afloat, and the absurd degrees to which they eventually go to keep them around.

The whole thing reminds me of Pizzagate a little bit in that what is notably missing from the conspiracy theory is anything it is actually seeking to explain. In fact it's worse than that, because at least Pizzagate had a theory on what was being concealed (paedophilia). This is just a collection of weird facts that doesn't cohere into any theory at all.

Lol

This is where it helps to be the party of paranoid lunatics. Imagine everything else about the universe was true but instead this bill was supported by Democrats and opposed by Republicans. Then imagine the Breitbart/AmericanFederalistPatriot.news headlines: Federal government planning to do genocide on white people, mandate affirmative action genetic testing for 'diversity' programs.

It's not. The Russian bank is making queries of the Trump mail server. The likely explanation probably involves it having received email from that server at some point.

Except pizzagate was bullshit and what we're getting here are facts that we don't know the meaning of. If you can't see that difference then maybe you've been spending too much time on the internet.

Forgetting Pizzagate ****** stuff for a moment, the bolded is sort of the distillation of the intensive focus on Russia from Democrats though. Yet again the theories are probably a little more well-formed than total nonsense but ultimately are distilled into into just collections of things that don't cohere into a good story. Maybe, though, Democrats are just taking a page from the right-wing playbook here since this is straight out of the tabloid style scandal guide: perpetual new developments and exciting new plot twists, no overarching story editor or author to galvanize into a coherent point.

Which isn't to say I think the focus on Russia is totally without merit; I agree wholeheartedly that the Trump Administration is almost surely hiding a great many things and engaged in corrupt self-serving enrichment schemes and malfeasance in tons of ways, ways that might even include explicit collusion with the Russian state, the Russian mob, the Russian extraction industry, or some combination of those elements both before and after the election and up to today.

But the Democrats/Trump opponents aren't really telling a coherent story on it, and so far it's just a collection of sometimes suspicious (Flynn, the story of the Rosneft sale), sometimes bizarre (the Steele dossier) and sometimes completely innocuous facts (Sessions met with a Russian!!!).

The story about Trump's email server communication with a Russian bank is the same thing: that's a little weird, suspicious but not dispositively so (e.g., you have to bring some prior assumptions to make it more dubious), and perhaps innocuous. It's really the perfect microcosm of Trump:Russia.

I'm assuming Micro isn't lying. The physical location of the server is irrelevant, why do you keep saying "rural Pennsylvania?"

In the bolded I'm just saying what Slate said.

IT professionals,

Could it just be something forgotten that had white listed a couple sources of emails, later meant to turn everything off, but the server remained open to the white list?

Could it be a SSL/SSH connection and someone in those places was logging into the machine and they wanted that blocked from anyone else?

Uh...

The "Russian stuff" is hugely scandalous. The problem is that the basic story was already known on Election Day and enough voters didn't care. As impeachment is a political process, R politicians cannot really do anything about it as we just had the ultimate political process, a Presidential election. Essentially R voters have done the jury nullification on treason.

I'd also like to point put that pizzagate was the result of information stemming from a Russian intelligence operation.

I wouldn't be shocked if the trolls who got the rubes moving on the subject were Russian either.

What's the scandal though? Assume I read the news so there's no need to cover that; I acknowledge there's a scandal in that there's an accusation of wrongdoing and people are talking about it.

Maybe ask the question differently: Which laws were broken?

Mind you I'm not so interested in this conversation as I am taking a Socratic approach here but basically, I think the accusation is that:

1) the Logan Act was violated
or
2) some form of election fraud transpired

Note that while I think it would be worthwhile for Congress and federal authorities to investigate, I'd be shocked to here you're toting around proof.

So you mean the slightly rigid definition of a scandal which is some bad accusations and people talking about them, and I'd argue the accusations of precisely what Trump and his campaign/admin did remain opaque.

As I said, right now the scandal is the mix of some genuinely suspicious behavior, some off the wall oddities, and some stuff that simply seem like essentially scandal p-hacking. The underlying hypothesis of casualty here is that Trump is in cahoots with Putin to do some bad stuff we think: maybe to be President, maybe enrich himself, maybe keep his pee videos secret, maybe empower white supremacy isolationism, some combination of all of them, and the precise specifics behind the grand theory here, e.g., the assumptions --> evidence --> conclusion: all of that remains TBD. We on the left just keep piling on evidence of variable quality and are waiting for someone to fill in the blanks.

"If there is no scandal, why lie about it?" thought Occam.

Yeah, I mean, it would have had to be someone else in his orbit. I don't think that part is particularly hard to believe, though. I'm not even convinced Trump himself had/has any knowledge of the Russian stuff. I think it could be one or two people like Manafort or the lawyer who orchestrated most of this (along with the Russians) and coaxed Trump along the way.

But anyway, you make several other good points re: the server, so thank you for talking me off the conspiritacy ledge.

Lots of lies. Some of them under oath. Also Trump openly calling for Russia to hack those emails. The motive is as clear as day, the meetings are clear and the lying about the meetings is prolific. But there's still no actual fire yet. We don't know exactly what was said in those meetings and we may never know.

DVaut is right - there is no real scandal yet. Some personal scandals, and a lot of smoke. But we're still one connection away imo.

That said, it's only one connection and it's not a hard leap to make at this point. We already know the Russians meddled in the election. We already know Trump's team was in contact with the Russians during the election.

If/when coordination is proven, then the real scandal begins.

You could also argue there's plenty of evidence for quid pro quo. Putin had it in for Clinton from her time as Secretary of State. He blamed her for Russian protests and near-uprisings that threatened his steel grip over Russia. We all know Russia wanted her to lose or at least be discredited as much as possible. Then there's the platform change in the RNC. Then there's Trump going hard after NATO, and him praising Putin many times all the way up to saying "we kill people too" to defend friggin' assassinations of political critics of Mr. Putin. Why are so many Trump campaign members meeting with Russia. Why are they all lying about it in all these official capacities. Why was Flynn working for Turkey and what exactly was he trying to accomplish to that effect. Did he ever disclose that info in his security clearance applications in the first place? Why did Sessions think it was worth risking his entire decades-long political career to lie under oath to Congress about these meetings with the Russians.

Trump supporters are still giddy about rounding up the Mexican criminals. A little Russian collusion won't matter. Pee tape who cares as long as Muslims are banned. My ins premiums double? well at least poor people aren't getting free healthcare.

Not that Trump needs apologists here -- and I agree Trump is probably guilty of all kinds of wrong-doings.

But that's why any one specific lies makes it hard to deduce the underlying motivation for the number of tawdry lies Trump and everyone around him tells. Like, Trump lies literally all the time. About everything. Is Putin behind his years long Birther campaign? Trump lies about voter fraud. Attacks in Sweden. He made up a fake publicist and impersonated him. He lies about his poll numbers and his success and his abilities. So he also lies about the extent of his contacts with Russia. Maybe he's just a serial liar because he's an narcissistic moron and all of the people in his employ have gotten hip to the fact he also wants them to lie and obfuscate.

Someone consistently lying makes it even less likely there's some overarching motivation (e.g., Putin pulling his puppet strings) behind it all. It makes it more likely he's just a terrible moron and all his people just scramble around doing their own things (e.g,, lobbying for Turkey or enrich their oil buddies) and then also lying about it because they know their boss is a serial liar and tacitly approves of that kind of style. As someone noted, voters have baked-in the Trump:Russia stories. It's morphed into a convenient place for Trump Admin lies to land: it's now in the realm of another partisan story, no political costs to the attribution arriving there.

I want to be clear that I factor in some large probability Trump is literally a Putin stooge or there is absolutely some illegal coordination between Putin and Trump. Could be. But Trump being a lying bozo scandal machine who requires persistent lies and obfuscation means we'll often get the underlying motivations wrong.

I disagree that there is no real scandal, what we are missing is a tie to trump of an actual law being broken. Plenty of scandal, just frayed wires in many of the connections.

for whatever this is worth, some of the conclusions Slate reaches in that article seem speculative to me, and I wish there was more information.

For example, how specifically were they "pinging" the server? Trying to connect to SMTP or POP? ICMP ping? It's not clear, nor what they mean by errors, and the details could make this whole question seem irrelevant imo.

They also don't actually know whether or not the Alfabank was also receiving errors if it tried to talk to the server, at least as I understand this story. They know that servers belonging to Alfa and Spectrum Health were initiating DNS lookups on mail1.trump-email.com. That's quite different from "pinging" the actual server, no matter how the ping is performed. Because of the way DNS works they have access to very comprehensive data on DNS lookups, but not direct traffic between servers, so they don't actually have information that says that subsequent connection requests made from Alfa to the Trump server succeeded whereas their own attempts to connect fail. They are inferring it from the patterns in the timestamps of the DNS lookups, which I agree are suggestive but not really dispositive.

Basically I agree with the conclusion that it's odd and something I would be interested in digging into if I were an FBI agent, but it's far from being conclusive imo.

As far as the value of my opinion, you should take it with a healthy dose of salt since I have no access to the data and am purely going off of the articles I've read, but fwiw I spent a few years doing research on click fraud in online advertising. Which is very different, obviously, but it was similar at least in the sense of spending a lot of time trying to find nefarious patterns in various data. One thing I learned is there's a lot of messiness and weird things that happen in network traffic that technically "shouldn't" happen, or which were surprising. The analogy here is that I think Chris is likely right that the space of bizarre but benign explanations is actually larger than you might think.

Seriously, CNN?