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On 31 October 2016 Slate published an article with the headline Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?. The inquisitive title introduced a lengthy article and a mish-mash of circumstantial details positing that Donald Trump maintained secretive financial ties to Russia which came to light in the course of an unofficial investigation: The article held that a bank in Moscow kept irregularly pinging a server registered to the Trump Organization on Fifth Avenue, adding that through further research the investigating parties determined [the activity] 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 and contained several asides about the unquestionable credibility of the unnamed individuals party to the project for example: The independent research done by the unnamed community of malware hunters purportedly commenced in mid-2016, shortly after rumors about Russian interference in that year's election began circulating. By September 2016, Slate reported that the self-appointed investigators had begun attempting to draw interest to their research (in one instance, by posting the information to a Reddit thread). After a New York Times reporter met with a U.S.-based representative from Alfa Bank for an unspecified related story, the Slate article asserted, a Trump domain purportedly under observation seemed to suddenly stop working. The researchers came to a subsequent conclusion, which the piece built upon in a remarkably far reaching manner: The Slate article's appearance just one week prior to the November 2016 general election unsurprisingly turned heads, despite its speculative nature. On the same day, the partisan Occupy Democrats web site published an item claiming that in an October Surprise development, ABC News had uncovered hundreds of millions of dollars in payments from Russians to Trump: Many social media users exposed only to the dueling headlines were left with the impression the two reports were linked and mutually substantiating. But Occupy Democrats' October Surprise piece was originally reported by another news outlet more than one month earlier and pertained to purported business (not campaign) dealings Trump had with Russian business interests (some of whom were U.S.-based). Moreover, its editorial focus was whether Trump's potential business links to Russia would influence his foreign policy decisions; it did not suggest Trump's campaign was being bought by Russian payments. The Trump campaign addressed and denied the allegations, while Hillary Clinton immediately tweeted twice about them: Much of the content of the Slate piece came from persons unable or unwilling to disclose their identities and credentials (and were therefore unavailable for questions), but it wasn't long before cybersecurity expert Robert Graham of Errata Security tackled the claims. In a more concise and far less speculative blog post, Graham cast reams of doubt on the entire claim set and noted that a hotel marketing management company (Cendyn), not Trump, controlled the domains in question: Graham concluded by noting that experts consulted by Slate offered piecemeal confirmations, none adding up to a whole: Graham (who concurrently affirmed on Twitter that he was supporting Clinton) supplemented his piece with several tweets providing ancillary information, as well as comment from peers in the field of cybersecurity: On the same day Slate's piece appeared, the New York Times reporter it referenced published his own article about Trump's purported ties to Alfa Bank. The conclusion of that piece was more in line with Graham's take: Alfa Bank also sent us a statement of their own, holding that no connection existed between that financial institution and Donald Trump: Rumors about Donald Trump's purported ties to Russia have circulated roughly since the July 2016 DNC Leaks and subsequent allegations that information dumped via WikiLeaks was an attempt to attack Hillary Clinton for the mutual benefit of those entities. But the Slate article (presented as a question in its title) simply strung together circumstantial details to suggest Trump had a server connection to Russia. A concurrent and a subsequent look at its conclusions (the latter by a cybersecurity expert who was not anonymous) asserted that the claims were unsubstantiated and likely amounted to nothing. In March 2017, CNN reported that the issue was still under investigation by the FBI, but nothing substantive had yet been turned up:
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