SALT LAKE CITY "Mary Cosby entered
The Real Housewives canon with a bang… well, a whiff. A whiff of "hospital smell." With an unexpected dig at co-star Jen Shah ("You smell like hospital"), the pastor with a passion for fashion cemented herself in the reality TV annals… but then, she slowly showed up less and less in each new episode of
The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City's freshman run, leaving viewers perplexed, wanting to know, where is Mary?!
"I don't know that people want more Mary," Mary herself quips to ET over video chat from her Utah home. "However, I want more Mary."
There is speculation out there that Mary was only a "friend of" during filming of
RHOSLC, turned into a full-time Housewife when it came time to edit the episodes. While Mary won't divulge whether that was the case, she does offer a hint.
"How can I say this without being blunt?" she ponders. "It just wasn't purposely done, but they kind of tried to fade Mary out and didn't know Mary was going to be more wanted."
Mary missed out on a group snowmobiling trek, a few dinners and, most surprising, the all-cast trip to Las Vegas, but she says she's not one to get FOMO. Most of Mary's appearances have been solo, at home with her husband, Robert, Sr., their son, Robert, Jr., her housekeepecousin Charlinda and copious amounts of clothing in almost every room; she seems to only interact with the other women over FaceTime -- and that's seemingly by design, on Mary's part. According to her, any opportunity she had to avoid on-screen foe Jen, she took.
"I feel like if I go in to do an event, or go to do something fun or enjoyable, dinner and vacation, that’s super touchy," she offers. "I'm gonna go with someone I enjoy, someone that enjoys me. That sounds fun. But to go with this group? Every escape was, like,
literally an escape for me. I was like, ahhh! Especially when I didn't have to go to Vegas. I was so happy, I was so relieved, 'cause I didn't wanna be in trouble. I want to abide by the rules, but … no, I didn't feel left out and I was at peace, very happy."
Mary did have to face the ladies in-person at the season 1 reunion, taped in New York City earlier this month. Ahead of the shoot, Mary appeared on
Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen and let it slip she hadn't been keeping up with watching the episodes. She says she wound up binging the season after that in order to get up to speed for reunion day.
"I think what surprised me was when I wasn't on [the episodes]," Mary admits when asked what she learned by finally watching the show. "The spark that comes with me. Oh, is that bad? … Like, my absence? It's clearly there."
Mary says the 12-hour filming day warrants a three-part reunion, as the women worked through all the issues from their debut outing. She says there will be resolution to the drama she sparked for the rest of the cast after claiming Lisa Barlow and Meredith Marks are "afraid of Jen" ("Does Mary Cosby lie? No, she does not lie," she purrs, alluding to where things go), as well as a number of unexpected apologies. Mary says she both gave and received apologies, which might mean a truce for her and Jen. When Bravo released the cast photo from the shoot, Mary and Jen were side by side and smiling -- but Mary's lips are (mostly) sealed.
"It's safe to say that says something, it says progress," she teases, but also notes she does not regret the "you smell like hospital" comment in the least. She says the remark, which Mary made before filming started, was never directed at Jen, like Jen assumed (Jen had been looking after her sick aunt, who underwent a double amputation on her legs around this time). In fact, Mary is adamant that she said "
it smells like hospital," speaking about the general atmosphere of the restaurant she was in with Jen and Meredith at the time, not Jen nor her aunt. Mary also claims she had no idea about Jen's aunt's condition, nor their close bond, until after the fact.
"No regrets," she declares. "I know my motive, I know where I was coming from. It can [seem like] a dig, and I see that, how it can come across as rude. What I do regret, probably, is the way I got so frustrated. I feel like I was being blamed for her [aunt's] legs and it was for all year, before we even aired. So, as soon as it aired I was like, I am not responsible."
Mary's distaste for the scent of medical buildings left viewers a little confused, though, seeing as a few episodes into the season, fans spotted Mary’s housekeeper, Charlinda, clad in scrubs and delivering Mary a meal on a tray, each item individually wrapped in cellophane as if it came from a hospital cafeteria. Mary says that's always how she's taken her food, a germ-free style of serving she learned from her late grandmother, Rosemary.
"It's how we were raised," she says, noting that when she was in the hospital herself to have "all [her] odor glands removed," her meals actually came on a cart and under cloche domes, like room service at a hotel.
As for Charlinda, Mary's cousin whom she claimed to not actually know all that well, despite being her employee for two decades? She's no longer in the picture.
"I don't know, she got the green eye and she turned on me and she left," Mary reveals. "She lived with me rent free for 20 years and then to turn on me it's, like, I really don’t know who she is."
While she still doesn't know Charlinda, Mary says she's never been more sure of who she (meaning Mary) is as a person. She says it's a relief for her story to be out in the world.
"This is Mary, and you accept Mary and her life or you don't," she says. "I don't have to hide. I don't have to steal. I don't have to cheat. I don't have to be someone I'm not -- and not only do I live by those morals every day, but now I can live it to the world."
Mary's home life became a hot topic as soon as her Bravo bio hit the internet,
Housewives fans honing in on one a quick line about how Mary is married to her one-time step-grandfather. It was her grandmother's wish that Mary take over her life -- the church she pastored, the businesses she ran, the homes she owned and, yes, even her marriage -- upon her death. As Mary said when the revelation made its way to TV, "Don't think it wasn't weird, 'cause it was! But I did it because I trusted my grandmother, and I'm so glad I did it."
"Life's just going to take you where you're supposed to go," Mary says. "It's up to you to follow it. [Joining the show] felt good. It felt right. I’m like, people think I'm weird [already]. They say it behind my back, they talk behind my back, let me just tell them in their face: This is Mary and, yes, I am married to my grandmother's ex-husband. How about that?"
Ahead of the season, Mary joined
The Real Housewives of New Jersey star Teresa Giudice for an Instagram Live, and proclaimed she had no skeletons in her closet. Then, allegations and accusations about Mary's life popped up online, with Reddit threads running rampant with rumors that Mary runs a cult, lives off of tithings given to the church by its parishioners, and only preached for the congregation when TV cameras showed up. She says it's all just nonsense.
"Clearly I’m not gonna get on national television, be a Housewife and be in a cult," Mary scoffs. "Like, come on. I believe in my church."
"They've been saying that since my grandmother started at the church," she says of the cult allegation. "There's no cult. ... My church members, they know those are false allegations. Those are ridiculous. It’s the people that are looking for fault."
Alleged audio of Mary demanding her congregation to give more offerings recently surfaced online, but Mary says she never takes funds from the church for personal use. The parish does believe in tithings, however, but that money stays at the church. It's not Mary's.
"That's so cruel," she says of the idea she would steal from the temple. "I feel like it's so judgmental, because I am African American and a woman and I do have an eye for finer things in life."
"I have intelligent church members and they know that was all to God," she adds. "I'm so not in it for the money. Oh my goodness, I believe in what I do, I believe in what I'm saying, and I love my church and I love what they are. … Money can't fulfill that, not for me."
Mary says she's happy to provide proof that she's preached at Faith Temple Church for more than 20 years, promising she would never have filmed one of her sermons for the show just as a performance. As for where her own money actually comes from, Mary says one, she's "blessed" by generational wealth passed down by her family and two, she and her husband own a number of businesses, including a successful printing company, which focuses on large-scale jobs, like billboards and mass production of shopping bags.
"But it's not like I just have money coming out of the walls," she cautions. "These [designer] things that I have are collector pieces."
Mary's "designer things" have also been much-talked about, as she shows up on the show in out-of-the-box fashions -- for the record, her favorite look is the one she wore to Park City Fashion Week, and she "hated" her makeup at the reunion, which is why she says she FaceTuned her posts from that day so much. On a recent episode, Mary revealed more than one room in her house doubles as a closet. Co-star Whitney Rose dubbed Mary a "high-end hoarder." While Mary threw out the idea of renting out a condo for a closet, she says she’s yet to pull the trigger, which would actually make for a fun season 2 story… that is, if she comes back for round two.
"I don't know if I'll do this again," she confesses. "That's a strong question, and I think I need a little harvesting. I think it's premature. I mean, would they want me back?"
Yes, Mary, they would."
ORANGE COUNTY "RHOC alum Jo De La Rosa has revealed her father, Juan, died aged 63 from Covid.
The devastated reality star, 40, said she buried her 15-year feud with Juan shortly before he died of the virus last week.
Jo - who starred in the first four seasons of RHOC - shared a video montage of sweet photos with Juan on Instagram, which she titled, "The Story Of Us".
"It is with the heaviest of hearts I share I lost my dad to Covid last week," she wrote.
"This pandemic has been life-changing for many people and unfortunately, Covid won this time. My father, Juan Carlos Contreras, was only 63."
The Bravo star added: "I’ve never cried more tears in my life than these last few days but today, I want to celebrate him and remember all the happy times we shared so I made a video called 'The Story of Us' which captures our story when my mom met him all the way until they got divorced."
Jo described Juan as "the type of person that would walk into a room and instantly capture people’s attention".
"He was the most charming, outgoing, playful and most 'people person' of all people persons you would’ve ever met," she said.
"He was a high school teacher, the most gifted musician, and had the silliest personality which I now realize is where I get it from. To put it simply, he was JOY."
Jo explained that her mother met Juan "at 14 as her guitar teacher and they fell in love through music ".
"He could do no wrong in my eyes and although my heart is filled with so much love for him, it’s also shattered and feels so heavy for not being able to reconcile sooner as it’s been 15 years since we last spoke," she added.
Jo explained that she ended their estrangement with an email when she found out Juan was ill - but isn't sure if he ever got it.
"That’s as much as my heart can share about our situation but I sent him an email when I found out he was in the hospital. In it, I told him I loved him and I wanted him back in my life," she explained.
"I don’t know if he ever got it but I was reminded by one of my best friends I’ll see him in Heaven again one day and we’ll have the rest of eternity to be able to reconcile. Thank you Doni for that truth as your words have been a light in my darkness."
She concluded: "To my dad - I love you. I forgive you. You meant absolutely everything to me. I can’t wait to see you when God finally calls me and says it’s time.
"All I want is to be able to tell you see you again and tell you these words face to face."
Jo shared a series of heartwarming memories of her and Juan, including them playing guitar and piano together, as well as posing in front of a Christmas tree and out in the snow."
"Kelly Dodd may be done with “The Real Housewives of Orange County.”
The Positive Beverage founder, 45, said in an Instagram Live that she would not return to the Bravo series if castmate Braunwyn Windham-Burke comes back for Season 16.
“I know I cannot film with Braunwyn,” she started telling fans in the Instagram Live (
captured by a fan account). “I know for a fact that I cannot film with her. There’s just no way and if she comes back then I’m out because I know for a fact that I cannot. She’s dangerous and calling people racists and homophobic.”
Dodd and Windham-Burke, 43, have been at odds since Dodd accused the mom of seven of using her sobriety for a storyline. She also questioned Windham-Burke’s decision to come out as a lesbian after over two decades of marriage to her husband, Sean Burke.
Off camera, Dodd accused Windham-Burke of once being placed under a 5150 psychiatric hold, a claim Windham-Burke denied.
Dodd added, “And … saying I’m a bad mom, I’m running around, like, traveling, well I was traveling, yes, but I was also selling two homes. And thank God I did because I’d be stuck with four mortgages, right?”
She then took a jab at Windham-Burke, adding, “I wasn’t going to party it up with the Salt Lake City chicks.”
Windham-Burke jetted off to Utah in September to hang out with Kary Brittingham from “RHOD” and Heather Gay from “RHOSLC.”
“If I’m coming back next year, I just can’t come back next year filming with somebody so reckless,” Dodd said. “I just can’t. If she’s on, I’m probably out. So, that’s probably the way it goes. And by the way, she says she couldn’t film with me, so there you go.”
Vicki Gunvalson claims that a
Real Housewives of Orange County producer was out to get her, alleges the same producer was also the reason she and Braunwyn Windham-Burke got off to a rocky start.
Vicki has been very vocal since her
RHOC departure and has openly admitted she was deeply hurt when she was fired after 14 seasons on the show. She’s now revealing some behind-the-scenes tea and discussing one particular producer that she still loathes to this day.
“There is a producer that’s currently on this cast, the last two years, that does not like me,” she claimed. “And I don’t like him. It’s public. I mean, I think he’s a snake in the grass and I think he’s always stirring up conflict that is not real conflict. So him and I had it out and I’m sure he probably said ‘she’s a problem, let’s get rid of her,’ you know? Because I saw right through his bullsh*t every time. Like why are you telling her to say that about me? Oh, he purposely just kind of tried to stir the pot and manipulate the situation.”
The Coto Insurance founder admits that she still “can’t stand” Braunwyn, but she explains what really went down the first night she met her at Tamra Judge‘s house.
“She came after me the first time at Tamra’s and I’ll never forgive her for it ever,” she told David Yontef on the
Behind the Velvet Rope podcast. “[But] off-camera she told me, ‘our producer told me to go after you.’ Cool! I took him by his earlobe, put him up against the wall, and said, ‘what the heck are you doing? I’m a quote-unquote friend this year and you’re going to do this to me the first time I get together with everybody? F*ck you!’ I was livid,” the grandmother-of-three shared.
“He’s just not a good guy. When you know that about a producer, you just don’t give them your all,” she continued.
Vicki was then asked what she regrets the most about doing the show and what advice she would go back and give herself in season one.
“I did everything right except falling prey to divorce,” she shared. “I mean, I think that in hindsight, I know for a fact that if I wasn’t on a reality show, I wouldn’t have been divorced. And that cost Donn and I both a lot of money because we had to split assets and alimony and all that stuff, so I paid more to him than he did to me because I had the business. So that’s hurtful and that’s hard.”
She goes on to reveal that because of her popularity from the show, she thought she “could have it all,” and that frame of mind paired with the fact that she and Donn were already having trouble is what led to an affair with Brooks Ayers.
“[Briana Culberson] and I talked about it because, [full] disclosure, I had an affair with Brooks,” she revealed. “I was traveling a lot with work and I had been in Atlanta and he was Mr. Southern gentlemen. And when we started to chat at that time, Donn and I were disconnected, my love tank was empty, [and] we were not having sex or anything. I felt very alone and so when another man started giving me attention, Donn and I were so distant, I just know it was an influential time in my life where I thought I was popular, I thought I could have it all. And you know, I ruined the family,” she humbly admitted.
Vicki claims she was so busy with both work and the show that she simply did not put the time into her marriage that she needed to. As a result, she and Donn grew extremely distant, and she wasn’t the only one who began to stray.
“I knew I didn’t bookend my relationship, and through counseling, I figured this out. When you travel the way I do and did, I would wake up, go to my meetings, go do my thing during the day with work,” Vicki explained. “Then at night, we would party and I would go to bed [at] one or two o’clock alone, but I never called Donn, or I never reached out to him and said, ‘I’m waking up, I’m going to meetings, or I’m in bed and I’m safe.'”
“And so what happened was one day went into two days into three days and I get home and he was like a stranger to me,” she continued. “And it was, you know, I’ll take the blame for it. He started straying, I started straying, and everything became more important than him and that’s not a marriage. You can’t do that.”
"If Heather Dubrow earned a dollar every time she was asked about
The Real Housewives of Orange County, she’d have enough cash to build 10 more extravagant houses.
While the
RHOC reference tickles her now, Heather said she wasn’t always thrilled to be constantly asked about the series. “You know, at the beginning when I first left the show, it was annoying because I just wanted it to break free and do my own thing and take my brand back and, you know, kind of move on,” she admitted to Showbiz Cheat Sheet.
“And I just couldn’t because everywhere I went, that’s all they asked about,” she said. “Now I feel like four or five years after leaving the show, I’ve done so many other things now. [Husband] Terry and I have written three books together. My podcast has has over 101 million downloads. My YouTube channel, TV shows I’ve done and hosting and whatnot.”
“And with a new show coming out [
The Seven Year Stitch], I feel like in my heart that people see me as Heather Dubrow now,” she reflected. “And not a member of
RHOC. It’s just part of my history. So now what I get asked about it, I think it’s kind of amusing.”
Heather’s teenage daughter Max, who recently launched the podcast,
I’ll Give it To You Straightish, said she’s never identified as a
Housewives kid.
“I think that my mom specifically like she’s not just an ex-
Housewife,” Max told Showbiz Cheat Sheet. “She does so many amazing things and will continue to and did before that.”
“So, you know, when they’re like on every article is like ‘Heather Dubrow, former
Housewife,’ it’s like she’s more than that,” she continued. “And so that’s you know … let it go. But for me personally, it hasn’t really bothered me. I’m just Heather Dubrow’s daughter. Not really a former
Housewives kid.”
Heather shared how she continues to supervise Max’s foray into the world of podcasting without being too heavy-handed with her guidance. “I came from really very nice parents, but my mom was controlling. And I’m controlling too but in a different kind of way. Like, I always felt like I needed her help,” Heather said.
“And if I didn’t get her approval on something … it’s just not the kind of relationship I wanted with my kids,” Heather admitted. “I always like to say, you know, my job is to develop [and] to raise these healthy, functioning, independent children.”
“And to me, any of the kids want advice and help. I don’t tell them how to do it,” she added. “I guide them so they can figure it out themselves.” For example, when Max started her own podcast, she quickly learned that it was a huge undertaking.
“People think these things that it’s easy and think, oh everyone should do that. It’s very difficult to do,” Heather shared. “But I love that she’s working it out and figuring it out on her own because that’s how not only is she going to learn that, but she’s going to succeed.”
NEW YORK "Former “Real Housewives of New York” star Barbara Kavovit has officially announced she’s running for mayor of New York City — adding to an already crowded field of Democratic candidates.
The Bronx-born Kavovit made it official on
her Instagram Wednesday, saying her beloved Big Apple “is in a state of crisis” under Mayor de Blasio’s watch.
“I may not be a politician, but I’m a Bronx-born New Yorker who isn’t fearful of the hard work and tough decisions that lay ahead,” she wrote. “It will take a builder to rebuild #NYC, and I’m the woman to do it.”
In September, Kavovit, the CEO of Evergreen Construction, floated her dreams of Gracie Mansion,
telling Page Six she was ready to rebuild the city.
“Number one is rebuild a safer and more inclusive New York City,” she said at the time. “So I feel like the city is not a safe place. So if it’s not safe, people don’t want to come to New York City. People don’t want to stay in New York City.”
Kavovit, 55, said her company, which she launched at age 21, is one of the largest female-owned commercial construction firms in the city.
Last year, Evergreen took a sledgehammer to Harvey Weinstein’s old offices at 99 Hudson Street.
“As a Bronx girl who’s paved her way in the male-dominated world of construction, I know something about overcoming adversity, creating opportunity and building something out of nothing–both for myself and those around me,” she
said on her website. “And that’s why I’m running for Mayor of New York City.”
Kavovit starred in Bravo’s hit “Housewives” series during Season 11 in 2019.
In June’s Democratic primary, she’ll square off against hopefuls including Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, former presidential candidate and businessman Andrew Yang, New York City’s former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia and former Citigroup executive Ray McGuire."
ATLANTA NEW JERSEY submitted by [Alfa-Bank (Mikhail Fridman) - - -> NTechLab/FindFace
http://archive.is/41bFq- - -> Trump Tower...]
[“Someone high in the Russian government wanted a communications channel between the Kremlin and the Trump Transition Team.” – TIME (2019)]
TIME—Questions Remain About Putin's Request for a Back Channel to the Trump Transition
(5/21/2019) ”A few weeks before Donald Trump became president, Russian banker Petr Aven, a billionaire oligarch with Moscow’s
Alfa Bank, pulled aside Washington lobbyist Richard Burt at a corporate meeting in Luxembourg with a sensitive request.
Aven told Burt that ‘someone high in the Russian government’ wanted
‘a communications channel between the Kremlin and the Trump Transition Team’ according to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s recently released report. Aven wanted Burt, a former ambassador who had helped Trump’s campaign, to work on setting it up.
Burt later told Mueller’s team that the request was, in the words of the report, ‘outside the normal realm’, even for Burt, a well-traveled Washington insider who had worked with Aven for years. It looks even more remarkable now.
The ‘high’ Russian official was none other than President Vladimir Putin, Mueller’s team would later learn. Amid what Mueller called a ‘flurry of Russian activity’ during the Trump transition, the Aven outreach is the only publicly known instance in which Putin, a onetime KGB spy, was personally involved in directing Russia’s clandestine efforts with the incoming administration.
The surreptitious contacts involving Putin, Aven and Burt as described in the Mueller report contradict repeated assertions by
Alfa Bank that it had no contacts with Trump or people around him. At the time of Trump’s election, Alfa Bank was at the center of a mystery over
an unexplained surge in computer traffic from Moscow to the Trump Organization in the midst of the
2016 presidential campaign. Computer analysts concluded that
Alfa Bank had developed
a covert communications channel to the Trump Organization.”
http://web.archive.org/web/20190731064842/https://time.com/5592739/donald-trump-petr-aven-alfa-bank [In late July 2016 NTechLab conducted the first test of FaceN biometric algorithm on members of the public at the annual Alfa Future People Festival (Alfa-Bank), a Burning Man style event in Russia. NTechLab used the image database to demonstrate the use of FindFace software for potential clients/investors.
In late July 2016 an independent team of data scientists were monitoring server traffic at Trump Tower in the wake of the DNC data breach. The hackers found something that has never been fully explained or understood since—data of an unknown and suspicious nature being transferred to a Trump Tower server. Upon close investigation the source of the anomalous communication was traced to a server inside Russia belonging to Alfa-Bank...]
•Forbes (Russia)—Face to face: Russian face recognition startups go global (12/5/2016) “Most of the usual users got to know the technology of face recognition thanks to FindFace. However, the founders of the company do not hide that the launch of the service was a thoughtful marketing move. The company does not plan to earn the existing part of the revenue from the mass audience. ‘We wanted to show everyone a modern level of technology development,’ [Alexander] Kabakov† explains. ‘Access was paid for not to heavily load our servers, so the revenue from the application is minimal.’ NTechLab also has two solutions: the cloud FindFace Cloud API and the licensed FindFace Enterprise Server SDK. The first commercial contract was signed by NTechLab with Alfa-Bank† and VimpelCom. Visitors to the festival of electronic music Alfa Future People with the help of FindFace could find their photos among hundreds of others by sending a selfie to a chat bot. ‘For three days, the bot received about 12,000 requests, and in response, he sent 30,500 pictures from AFP photographers,’ says Snezhana Chernogortseva, Strategic Marketing Director of VimpelCom.”
http://www.forbes.ru/tehnologii/333977-licom-k-licu-rossiyskie-startapy-po-raspoznavaniyu-lic-vyhodyat-na-mirovoy-uroven (
http://archive.is/y9gEt) [Translated] †[😐 Alexander (Aleksandr) Kabakov: NTechLab/FindFace founder (2015), VP of Special Projects (social media) at Mail.Ru (2017) during Facebook “image scraping” massive data collection, Agency One digital communications (founding partner, 2010), political scientist, online presidential campaign manager (Prokhorov/“Right Cause” 2012, Putin/“United Russia” 2018)
http://bit.ly/2uwKVfb http://bit.ly/2TIDRpC;
http://bit.ly/2HVjLWX;
http://bit.ly/2JHsVcb]
•The Rachael Maddow Show—New look at Trump Org server mystery suggests avenues of inquiry (10/9/2018) “Dexter Filkins, contributor to The New Yorker, talks with Rachel Maddow about what is known about unusual communication between a Trump Organization computer server and a server at Russia's Alfa Bank, and what more some well-placed subpoenas could find out.”
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/new-look-at-trump-org-server-mystery-suggests-avenues-of-inquiry-1340582467598 (
http://archive.is/i5g92)
•Financial Times—Skadden’s oligarch work comes into focus after Mueller charges (2/23/2018) “Mikhail Fridman, the Ukrainian-born billionaire and co-founder of Alfa Group, would rely on Skadden in his battles with the British government and with BP, the UK oil and gas group. Roman Abramovich [
http://facebook.com/story/graphql_permalink/?graphql_id=UzpfSTEwMDAwMDQyNTc3Mzc1MDpWSzoyNDAwMTU2MjA2ODk2MjM5], the Russian billionaire, trusted the firm so much that he made the head of its European operations the chairman of Chelsea football club after he acquired the team in 2003. After almost three decades of relationship building and profit making with the toughest businessmen to emerge from the ruins of the Soviet Union, the firm has found itself under the spotlight as the US Department of Justice investigates Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. On Tuesday, Alex van der Zwaan, a former London-based Skadden associate, pleaded guilty in a Washington DC court to lying to government prosecutors investigating the lobbying activities of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates in Ukraine. Mr. van der Zwaan’s prosecution by Robert Mueller, special counsel, is connected to a report Skadden wrote in 2012 for the Ukrainian government as part of a PR campaign allegedly orchestrated by Mr. Manafort. The report continues to haunt the firm six years later. Skadden would advise the oligarch in his successful court battle with Boris Berezovsky, his one-time friend and mentor who fled Russia in 2000 after clashing with Vladimir Putin. Skadden’s fees in the Berezovsky case in 2012 were a reported £35m. Mr. Buck became chairman of Chelsea after advising on Mr. Abramovich’s £140m takeover in 2003. Mr. Buck, now retired from Skadden, declined to comment for this article. He once rejected the label of ‘Abramovich’s right-hand man’ and instead called himself ‘the little-toe-on-the-left-foot man’. The firm also forged a relationship with Mikhail Fridman, acting for the AAR consortium that included Mr. Fridman and German Khan, a Russian-Ukrainian billionaire, in its battle with BP in 2011. Skadden later represented Mr Fridman when the UK government forced his L1 investment vehicle to sell gasfields in the North Sea. The firm gained a reputation for handling knotty and difficult corporate deals. Pavel Malyi, the firm’s first hire in Moscow who later served as chief financial officer of Sibur, the gas processing and petrochemical company, said Skadden would be his first call for tricky transactions in Russia. A lawyer who saw the firm’s litigators in action called them ‘tough, smart and savvy’. But Skadden’s involvement in Ukraine’s turbulent politics proved less sure-footed. In 2012, Mr. Manafort, the American lobbyist and later campaign manager for Donald Trump, helped arrange a report by Skadden for the Moscow-backed government of Viktor Yanukovych, former president of Ukraine. US investigators have taken an interest in the case as part of Mr. Mueller’s investigation into Mr. Gates’ and Mr. Manafort’s dealings in Ukraine. On Thursday, Mr. Mueller filed new charges of fraud and tax evasion against the pair. Mr. Manafort has denied wrongdoing. Mr. Gates is expected to plead guilty on Friday to conspiracy against the US and making a false statement The Ukraine report has been thrust into the spotlight once again because of Mr. van der Zwaan, 33, a Dutch national who worked for Skadden in London. The Russian-speaking associate worked on the Tymoshenko report. Mr. van der Zwaan’s profile, since deleted from Skadden’s website, also listed work for Gennady Bogolyubov, a Ukrainian oligarch, when the businessman was sued by his fellow countryman Victor Pinchuk in 2013. He also acted for Mr. Abramovich’s businesses in relation to mining assets in Ukraine, according to the profile. Last summer, the associate’s connections to the oligarch world deepened when he married Eva Khan, a daughter of Mr. Khan, the Russian-Ukrainian billionaire whose interests Skadden has represented in the past alongside Mr. Fridman.”
http://www.ft.com/content/741975b0-18ae-11e8-9376-4a6390addb44 (
http://archive.is/EWc7e)
•Tea Pain (data science blog)—Data Patterns Suggest Trump ToweSpectrum Health Ran a “Stealth Data Machine” With Russia (3/8/2018) “Jared Kushner is currently taking a victory lap, crowin’ about his ‘Stealth Data Machine’ that put Donald Trump over the top in the 2016 race. Let’s pry off the lid and peer into the inner-workings of this ‘Data Machine.’ The Signal in the Noise: Building on the data analysis by @Conspirator0 on Twitter, Tea Pain has stumbled onto a possible ‘signal in the noise’ that opens a window into the data-swappin’ shenanigans going on between Trump Tower, Spectrum Health and Russia’s Alfa Bank during the election. The data traffic, when analyzed, tells a very different story, a story of automated, orchestrated data sharing among multiple sites for a strategic end. Tea Pain originally dismissed this story as a possible red-herring. With the Russia craze at a fever pitch, this activity could be explained by what Tea’s daddy used to say, ‘When you got a new hammer, everything looks like a nail.’ But when Tea Pain saw the data patterns analyzed by Conspiritor0, he knew he’d spotted something mighty familiar: Database Replication. Put a pin in that, more on that later. At first, data analysts were puzzled by what appeared to be random activity with no apparent pattern. Perhaps it was email activity? Maybe money transfers? But there were literally thousands of these IP ‘pings.’[...] Whatever was running, it would hook up, transfer data for a few minutes, then go to sleep for an hour. This was the clue that led Tea Pain to formulate a much clearer working model to explain what we were all seeing: SQL Server Database Replication between multiple sites. What Is Database Replication?: Database Replication is a rather simple concept. When you have a database with millions of records representing hundreds of gigabytes of data, and you would like to keep a copy of that database housed in 2 or more locations, it makes no sense to continually copy the entire database from point A to point B every time a change is made, so you ‘replicate’ it. This allows only the changes made to be sent from one database to another[...] Tea Pain’s working theory is that Russia created a voter targeting database with information gleaned from hacked DNC data rolls and other data rolls ‘acquired’ from other states to feed this growing contact database. That database originated at Russian Intelligence which was in turn replicated to Russia’s Alfa Bank. This is where the ‘data laundering’ takes place, Alfa Bank is the pivot point where the FSB’s data fingerprints are wiped clean. Ironically Russia launders its data at the same place it launders its money. At Trump Tower, more data could merged into this system using various legal sources as well. Spectrum Health could also add value to the data by matching names and addresses in their extensive healthcare databases to harvest email addresses and phone numbers to flesh out this list. All these changes would be promptly replicated back to Russia in a matter of hours. Once back in the hands of Russian Intelligence, this massaged data could be programmatically matched up with social media handles to create a micro-targeted ‘hit list’ for the thousand Russian trolls employed by Putin.”
http://web.archive.org/web/20170404010239/https://teapainusa.wordpress.com/2017/04/03/data-patterns-suggest-trump-towerspectrum-health-ran-a-stealth-data-machine-with-russia •Meduza—The end of privacy ‘Meduza’ takes a hard look at FindFace and the looming prospect of total surveillance (7/14/2016) “In June 2016, N-Tech. Lab sold its technology to Beeline to create the Alfa Future People Electronic music festival app. The festival will be held on July 22 – 24 under Nizhny Novgorod, last year it gathered about 40,000 spectators. The application based on the FACEN algorithm will allow you to send your selfie to the robot, which, in turn, will find other photos of the user in the festival [data]base.”
http://web.archive.org/web/20160827095842/https://meduza.io/en/feature/2016/07/14/the-end-of-privacy •The Rachel Maddow Show—New look at Trump Org server mystery suggests avenues of inquiry (10/9/2018) “Dexter Filkins, contributor to The New Yorker, talks with Rachel Maddow about what is known about unusual communication between a Trump Organization computer server and a server at Russia's Alfa Bank, and what more some well-placed subpoenas could find out.”
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/new-look-at-trump-org-server-mystery-suggests-avenues-of-inquiry-1340582467598 (
http://archive.is/i5g92)
•The Rachel Maddow Show—Republicans To Put Russian Bank Lawyer In Coveted DoJ Position [Alfa-Bank]
http://facebook.com/drew.incarnate/posts/1736659809691528 •CNN—Russian bank sends threatening letter to computer scientist who called for Trump investigation [Alfa-Bank] (3/22/2017) "Alfa-Bank has stepped up its fight against computer scientists who suggested the major Russian bank was in communication with the Trump Organization in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The bank has sent a letter to one of those computer scientists, L. Jean Camp of Indiana University, warning of potential legal action. 'Alfa-Bank is exploring all available options to protect itself from malicious or tortious interference,' it said. 'Those options include litigation.' In recent months, Camp posted the bank's leaked computer logs on her personal website. She has repeatedly said 'this computer traffic should be investigated" by American law enforcement. In its letter, the bank noted that she "disclosed certain computer data regarding Alfa Bank... and encouraged inquiries into supposed links to the Trump Organization.' 'Your activities continue to this day to promote an unwarranted investigation into Alfa-Bank's 'communication' with the Trump Organization,' the letter warned."
http://www.facebook.com/drew.incarnate/posts/1736726246351551 •Politico—3 Russians named in Trump dossier sue Fusion GPS for libel [Fridman, Alfa-Bank]
http://facebook.com/drew.incarnate/posts/1737103689647140 •Getty Images—Face Control Finds First Commercial Use At Alfa Future People Festival
http://facebook.com/drew.incarnate/posts/1736623383028504 •Slate—Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia? (10/31/2016) “This spring, a group of computer scientists set out to determine whether hackers were interfering with the Trump campaign. They found something they weren’t expecting. [...] 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. (I communicated extensively with Tea Leaves and two of his closest collaborators, who also spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, since they work for firms trusted by corporations and law enforcement to analyze sensitive data. They persuasively demonstrated some of their analytical methods to me—and showed me two white papers, which they had circulated so that colleagues could check their analysis. I also spoke with academics who vouched for Tea Leaves’ integrity and his unusual access to information. ‘This is someone I know well and is very well-known in the networking community,’ said Camp. ‘When they say something about DNS, you believe them. This person has technical authority and access to data.’) 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. The researchers had initially stumbled in their diagnosis because of the odd configuration of Trump’s server. ‘I’ve never seen a server set up like that,’ says Christopher Davis, who runs the cybersecurity firm HYAS InfoSec Inc. and won a FBI Director Award for Excellence for his work tracking down the authors of one of the world’s nastiest botnet attacks. ‘It looked weird, and it didn’t pass the sniff test.’ The server was first registered to Trump’s business in 2009 and was set up to run consumer marketing campaigns. It had a history of sending mass emails on behalf of Trump-branded properties and products. Researchers were ultimately convinced that the server indeed belonged to Trump.”
http://web.archive.org/web/20161031215320/http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/10/was_a_server_registered_to_the_trump_organization_communicating_with_russia.html •The New Yorker—Was There a Connection Between a Russian Bank and the Trump Campaign?; A team of computer scientists sifted through records of unusual Web traffic in search of answers. (10/15/2018) “A set of cryptic data has inspired a years-long argument over its meaning. In June, 2016, after news broke that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked, a group of prominent computer scientists went on alert. Reports said that the infiltrators were probably Russian, which suggested to most members of the group that one of the country’s intelligence agencies had been involved. They speculated that if the Russians were hacking the Democrats they must be hacking the Republicans, too. ‘We thought there was no way in the world the Russians would just attack the Democrats,’ one of the computer scientists, who asked to be identified only as Max, told me. [...] As Max and his colleagues searched D.N.S. logs for domains associated with Republican candidates, they were perplexed by what they encountered. ‘We went looking for fingerprints similar to what was on the D.N.C. computers, but we didn’t find what we were looking for,’ Max told me. ‘We found something totally different—something unique.’ In the small town of Lititz, Pennsylvania, a domain linked to the Trump Organization (mail1.trump-email.com) seemed to be behaving in a peculiar way. The server that housed the domain belonged to a company called Listrak, which mostly helped deliver mass-marketing e-mails: blasts of messages advertising spa treatments, Las Vegas weekends, and other enticements. Some Trump Organization domains sent mass e-mail blasts, but the one that Max and his colleagues spotted appeared not to be sending anything. At the same time, though, a very small group of companies seemed to be trying to communicate with it. Examining records for the Trump domain, Max’s group discovered D.N.S. lookups from a pair of servers owned by Alfa Bank, one of the largest banks in Russia. Alfa Bank’s computers were looking up the address of the Trump server nearly every day. There were dozens of lookups on some days and far fewer on others, but the total number was notable: between May and September, Alfa Bank looked up the Trump Organization’s domain more than two thousand times. [...] One remarkable aspect of Foer’s story [Slate] involved the way that the Trump domain had stopped working. On September 21st, he wrote, the Times had delivered potential evidence of communications to B.G.R., a Washington lobbying firm that worked for Alfa Bank. Two days later, the Trump domain vanished from the Internet. [...] [T]he Trump-Alfa Bank story seemed to fade. The Trump campaign dismissed any connection, saying, ‘The only covert server is the one Hillary Clinton recklessly established in her basement.’ Bloggers and tech journalists assailed the Slate piece online. The cybersecurity researcher Robert Graham called the analysis ‘nonsense,’ and complained, ‘This is why we can’t have nice things on the Internet.’ He pointed out several problems. For instance, Foer’s sources had found that the Trump domain was blocking incoming e-mail, and argued that this was evidence that Trump and Alfa Bank were maintaining a private communications network; in fact, Listrak routinely configured its marketing servers to send e-mail but not to receive it. Graham also noted that the domain was administered not by Trump but by Cendyn, a company in Boca Raton that handled his company’s marketing e-mail. Alfa Bank hired two cybersecurity firms, Mandiant and Stroz Friedberg, to review the data. Both firms reported that they had found no evidence of communications with the Trump Organization. The bank also began trying to uncover the anonymous sources in the Slate piece. Attorneys representing Alfa contacted Jean Camp, telling her that they were considering legal action and asking her to identify the researchers who had assembled the data. [...] Alfa Bank was founded by Mikhail Fridman, in the last years of the Soviet Union. Fridman was born in western Ukraine and studied metallurgy in college. Like many others of his generation, he was introduced to the market economy through hustle. He sold theatre tickets, washed windows, and ran a student discothèque. After the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1991, Fridman joined the scramble to befriend members of the new government and amass a fortune with help from the state. Along with an economist named Petr Aven, who had previously served as the country’s minister for foreign economic relations, Fridman built Alfa Bank into one of the most successful businesses in the new Russia. Its parent company, Alfa Group, now controls the country’s largest private bank, along with financial institutions in several European nations. Fridman and Aven acquired reputations as brilliant, relentless businessmen. Describing the lawless post-Soviet years to the journalist Chrystia Freeland, who is now the foreign minister of Canada, Fridman said, ‘We were absolute savages.’ In a notorious episode in 2008, a group of Russian companies, including Alfa Group, tried to gain control of a joint venture they’d formed with British Petroleum. The power struggle was so fierce that the C.E.O. of the joint venture, Robert Dudley, felt compelled to leave Russia. The oligarchs kept pushing for control of the BP venture until it was sold to a state-owned petroleum company, for fifty-five billion dollars; Alfa Group’s cut was almost fourteen billion. Alfa Bank prospered during the Yeltsin years and has continued to do so under Putin. Though Fridman and Aven are not part of Putin’s innermost circle, they have managed to avoid the fate of some other oligarchs, who have had assets seized and, in a few cases, been imprisoned, after falling out of favor. Michael McFaul, a former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, told me he was impressed that Fridman and Aven had ‘navigated the very difficult world of maintaining their private business interests and not crossing the Kremlin.’ One reason the server story alarmed Alfa Bank was that it threatened the bank’s standing in Washington. Members of Russia’s government and many of its businessmen have been under American economic sanctions since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, but Alfa’s principals and representatives have enjoyed access to U.S. politicians at the highest levels. Fridman and Aven met several times with officials at the Obama White House, discussing such issues as Russia’s effort to gain entrance to the World Trade Organization. (Alfa Bank maintains that it has ‘never advocated for political or trade issues on behalf of the Russian government.’) ‘Fridman and Aven were seen as people that Washington could talk to about U.S.-Russia, because they checked two boxes—they were ‘polite company’ oligarchs, and they could shed light on Putin’s intentions and perspective,’ a senior official in the Obama Administration told me. ‘They got meetings at State and on the Hill and at the White House. And they were understood to be operating with the consent and guidance of Vladimir Putin.’ Alfa is still closely tied to the Russian system, but Fridman and Aven live much of the time in the United Kingdom. If there was a communications link with the Trump Organization, it might have been created without their knowledge. According to experts I spoke to, large Russian companies typically have a member of the intelligence services, either active or retired, working at a senior level. If a company’s services are required in some way, the officer—called a kurator—coördinates them. ‘A company couldn’t say no,’ a Washington-based Russia expert told me. (When asked about this, an Alfa Bank spokesperson said, ‘To our knowledge there are no senior intelligence officials at senior levels at Alfa Bank.’) This past May, I saw Petr Aven in New York, at the Four Seasons Hotel. He had just come from a dinner in Washington, at which he had met a group of prominent Americans, including officials from the White House, to discuss Russia’s economic situation. Aven seemed worried about surveillance; before we sat down, he brought his phone to the other side of the lobby and hid it behind a plant. He wouldn’t say much for the record, but he told me that his bank didn’t have ‘any connection at all with Trump—nothing.’ Aven and Fridman have visited Washington less often since Trump took office. But Trump’s victory appeared to elevate Alfa Bank’s connections there—at least by association. Don McGahn, the White House counsel, came from Jones Day, one of the law firms that represent Alfa Bank in the United States. McGahn brought five Jones Day lawyers with him into the White House; six more were appointed to senior posts in the Administration. Jones Day has done work for businesses belonging to a long list of Russian oligarchs, including Oleg Deripaska, Viktor Vekselberg, and Alexander Mashkevich. The firm has also represented the Trump campaign in its dealings with Robert Mueller. For this reason, McGahn secured an ethics waiver that allows him to talk to his old firm when its clients have business before the U.S. government. In June, 2017, Trump nominated Brian Benczkowski, a lawyer who had overseen the Stroz Friedberg report for Alfa Bank, to lead the criminal division of the Justice Department. At his confirmation hearing, Benczkowski said emphatically that Stroz Friedberg, like Mandiant, had rejected the possibility of complicity. The investigation, he said, found that ‘there was no communications link between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank.’ Democratic senators expressed concern that Benczkowski had taken on work for Alfa Bank; he had been a senior member of Trump’s transition team and had good reason to expect that he would be appointed to a job in the Administration. ‘The client was a Russian bank that is under suspicion of having a direct connection with the Trump campaign,’ Senator Richard Durbin said, during the hearing. [...] [T]he traffic coincided with Paul Manafort’s time as Trump’s campaign manager—but the D.N.S. queries continued after Manafort stepped down. ‘A lot of people are seeing faces in clouds,’ Leto said. The Trump Organization had done little to clarify the matter. In October, 2016, it released a statement denying interactions with Alfa Bank ‘or any Russian entity.’ Instead, it offered a peculiar explanation for the D.N.S. traffic: it had been triggered when ‘an existing banking customer of Cendyn’—the marketing firm—had used the company’s systems to send communications to Alfa Bank. Such a scenario would be highly irregular; it was as if Gmail had allowed a user to send e-mail from another user’s account. ‘It makes no sense,’ Paul told me. Trump’s advocates claimed that the investigations sponsored by Alfa Bank had proved that Alfa and the Trump Organization were not communicating. In fact, they sidestepped the question. Mandiant, one of the cybersecurity firms, said that it was unable to inspect the bank’s D.N.S. logs from 2016, because Alfa retained such records for only twenty-four hours. The other firm, Stroz Friedberg, gave the same explanation for why it, too, was “unable to verify” the data. As Jones’s team vetted the data, they examined various possible explanations. One was malware, which had played a role in the hack of the D.N.C.’s computers. Most malware has ‘distinctive patterns of behavior,’ Camp told me. It is typically sent out in a blast, aimed simultaneously at multiple domains. There is a ‘payload’—a mechanism that activates the malicious activity—and a ‘recruitment mechanism,’ which enables the malware to take over parts of a vulnerable computer. None of the experts whom Jones assembled found any evidence of this behavior on the Trump server. ‘Malware doesn’t keep banging on the door like that,’ Paul said. A second possibility was marketing e-mail. After the Slate article appeared, some commentators suggested that Trump’s server had innocently sent promotional e-mails to Alfa Bank, and that a computer there had responded with queries designed to verify the identity of the sender. [...] The timing and the frequency of the D.N.S. lookups also did not suggest spam, Paul and Leto believed. Mass-marketing e-mails are typically sent by an automated process, one after another, in an unbroken rhythm. The Alfa queries seemed to fall into two categories. Some came in a steady pulse, while others arrived irregularly—sometimes many in a day, sometimes a few. ‘The timing of the communication was not random, and it wasn’t regular-periodic,’ Paul said. ‘It was a better match for human activity.’ But, if the Trump server wasn’t sending or receiving e-mail, what could explain the traffic? There was the possibility of ‘spoofing’—essentially, faking an identity. [...] As Jones’s team sifted through explanations for the traffic, they began constructing their own theory. ‘What you have here is a minimally viable technical footprint of a small number of people who are using what I suspect is an ad-hoc system to communicate,’ Paul said. ‘Anytime the F.B.I. or anyone else pulls apart a cyber-crime organization, there is always some communication structure that’s used for command and control. That’s where the high-value communications happen.’ (Max and his colleagues did not see any D.N.S. evidence that the Trump Organization was attempting to access the server; they speculated that the organization was using a virtual private network, or V.P.N., a common security measure that obscures users’ digital footprints.) If this was a communications mechanism, it appeared to have been relatively simple, suggesting that it had been set up spontaneously and refined over time. Because the Trump Organization did not have administrative control of the server, Paul and Leto theorized that any such system would have incorporated software that one of the parties was already using. ‘The likely scenario is not that the people using the server were incredibly sophisticated networking geniuses doing something obscure and special,’ Max said. ‘The likely scenario is that they adapted a server and vender already available to them, which they felt was away from prying eyes.’ Leto told me that he envisioned ‘something like a bulletin-board system.’ Or it could have been an instant-messaging system that was part of software already in use on the server. Kramer, of Listrak, insisted that his company’s servers were used exclusively for mass marketing. ‘We only do one thing here,’ he told me. But Listrak’s services can be integrated with numerous Cendyn software packages, some of which allow instant messaging. One possibility is Metron, used to manage events at hotels. In fact, the Trump Organization’s October, 2016, statement, blaming the unusual traffic on a ‘banking customer’ of Cendyn, suggested that the communications had gone through Metron, which supports both messaging and e-mail. The parties might also have been using Webmail—e-mail that leaves few digital traces, other than D.N.S. lookups. Or, Paul and Leto said, they could have been communicating through software used to compose marketing e-mails. They might have used a method called foldering, in which messages are written but not sent; instead, they are saved in a drafts folder, where an accomplice who also has access to the account can read them. ‘This is a very common way for people to communicate with each other who don’t want to be detected,’ Leto told me. David Petraeus, when he was the director of the C.I.A., used this method to exchange intimacies—and to share classified information—with his lover, Paula Broadwell. In June, an attorney for the Mueller investigation accused Paul Manafort of using foldering to facilitate secret communications. Given the limitations of D.N.S. data, none of the independent experts I spoke to could be certain of what Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization were doing. Some of them cautioned that it was impossible even to guess at every way that an e-mail system might malfunction. A senior analyst at a D.N.S.-service provider said, ‘Things can get messed up in unexpected ways.’ But Paul and Leto maintained that they had considered and rejected every scenario that they had encountered in decades of cybersecurity work. ‘Is it possible there is an innocuous explanation for all this?’ Paul said. ‘Yes, of course. And it’s also possible that space aliens did this. It’s possible—just not very likely.’ [...] If Trump and Alfa Bank [...] were communicating, what might they have been talking about? Max and some of the other scientists I spoke to theorized that they may have been using the system to signal one another about events or tasks that had to be performed: money to be transferred, for instance, or data to be copied. ‘My guess is that, whenever someone wanted to talk, they would do a D.N.S. lookup and then route the traffic somewhere else,’ Richard Clayton, of the University of Cambridge, said. Camp also speculated that the system may have been used to coördinate the movement of data. She noted that Cambridge Analytica, which was working for the Trump campaign, took millions of personal records from Facebook. In Camp’s scenario, these could have been transferred to the Russian government, to help guide its targeting of American voters before the election. The researchers I spoke with were careful to point out that the limits of D.N.S. data prevent them from going beyond speculation. If employees of the companies were talking, the traffic reveals nothing about who they were or what they were saying; it is difficult to rule out something as banal as a protracted game of video poker. ‘If I’m a cop, I’m not going to take this to the D.A. and say we’re ready to prosecute,’ Leto said. ‘I’m going to say we have enough to ask for a search warrant.’ More complete information could be difficult to obtain. This March, after Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee announced that it had found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, the committee’s Democrats filed a dissent, arguing that there were many matters still to be investigated, including the Trump Organization’s connections to Alfa Bank. The Democrats implored the majority to force Cendyn to turn over computer data that would help determine what had happened. Those records could show who in the Trump Organization used the server. There would probably also be a record of who shut down the Trump domain after the Times contacted Alfa Bank. Cendyn might have records of any outgoing communications sent by the Trump Organization. But the request for further investigation is unlikely to proceed as long as Republicans hold the majority. ‘We’ve all looked at the data, and it doesn’t look right,’ a congressional staffer told me. ‘But how do you get to the truth?’ The enigma, for now, remains an enigma. The only people likely to finally resolve the question of Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization are federal investigators.”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/15/was-there-a-connection-between-a-russian-bank-and-the-trump-campaign (
http://archive.is/MSR3j)
[“No collusion”? Collusion.]
Here’s where Vegas odds put Democratic candidates ahead of the Nevada caucuses By Charles Duncan. Betting on elections is illegal in Nevada, according to the Las Vegas Sun News. Here’s where Vegas odds put Democratic candidates ahead of the Texas primary along with many other candidates on California’s presidential ballot March 01, 2020 4:07 PM 2020 Presidential Candidates, Ranked by Vegas Odds (Photos) Kirsten Gillibrand 33/1 The Democratic junior senator from New York has vowed to recruit more women for political office. Betting Odds - Democratic Presidential Nomination. Dem Delegate Count, Map | Dem Popular Vote | Latest 2020 Polls. Betting Odds - Democratic Presidential Nomination The long list of Democratic candidates for the presidency in 2020 will get their first big chance to boost their odds of taking the White House over the next two nights when the Party holds its US Presidential Election 2020 - Democratic Candidate Joe Biden -2000 Hillary Clinton +1500 Bernie Sanders +1500 Michelle Obama +4500 Tulsi Gabbard +20000 . Odds on the Democrat Nominee for the 2020 Election according to Bovada Sportsbook. Updated on March 16, 2020. US Presidential Election 2020 - Democratic Candidate Joe Biden -1500 Handicapping the Odds for the Democratic Vice Presidential Nominee. Kamala Harris, the junior senator from California, has emerged as the Democratic VP candidate. Before her nomination, William Hill had her as the -175 favorite (bet $175 to win $100) to join Joe Biden’s ticket. Seems they picked right; makes sense for such a storied sportsbook. 1 of 17 Betting odds to win the presidency as of July 31, 2019, according to Bovada 1. President Donald Trump: EVEN Trump has far and away the best odds of any individual candidate, since Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg on stage at the Democratic Presidential Debate hosted by NBC News and MSNBC with The Nevada Independent at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel in Las Vegas Democratic Presidential Candidates for 2020. The field of Democrats running for the 2020 Presidency currently has eight (8) candidates participating. Each candidate has unique running policies and positions they represent. While the field may be packed, there are plenty of odds and betting lines on the Presidential candidates.
