The Mississippi delegation also enjoyed private discussions with both Governor Barbour and his deputy, Phil Bryant. Parties from the USRBC attended a dinner at Barbour's private residence and Phil Bryant, then the Lieutenant Governor, hosted a private dinner at his home too.
Hayley Barbour, I discovered, had founded a lobbying company called BGR Group184 in 1991. In 2013, the firm was paid almost fourteen million dollars and its three largest clients were the Republic of India, Ukraine Chevron Corporation, and the State of Kazakhstan. In April 2015, the Government of South Korea retained BGR for public relations and image building. The firm also employed various former political figures.
Barbour was the governor of Mississippi between 2004 and 2012, having previously served under Ronald Reagan before becoming head of the Republican National Committee for a number of years. During his stint as governor, his BGR monies were held in a blind trust arrangement185 but this arrangement had always attracted media coverage. His filings with the Mississippi Ethics Commission showed continued payments from BGR and withdrawals from the trust which had a market value of nearly three-and-a-half million dollars according to its trustee, the president of the Bank of Yazoo City, Griffin Norquist. Correspondence between Barbour and the trustee from 2008 and 2009 – filed with the Ethics Commission – show Barbour pulling nearly two hundred grand out of the trust in 2008, seventy-five thousand dollars of it for an income tax payment, and over two hundred and fifty thousand out in 2009 with an unspecified portion of it being for taxes. His state salary was listed at just over one hundred and twenty-two thousand dollars a year, so the tax designations of these withdrawals indicate a significant second income which no one knew about. According to Norquist, as of December the 31st 2008, the aggregate market value of assets in the trust was almost three and a half million dollars.
BGR Group represented Alfa Bank, one of the USRBC members, from at least 2004 until 2015, during the period Barbour was holding the public office of governor. Lobbying Disclosure Act papers186 which I found on the internet – a much better system than the UK’s absolute refusal to discuss lobbying except during scandals – show BGR received almost six million dollars from the Moscow bank over the period, for lobbying activity related to “Bilateral US-Russian Relations.” The people behind the Russian financial organisation are very closely linked to Vladimir Putin according to the infamous assessment of Christopher Steele, a former British spy.
Alfa Bank187 is one of the largest private financial houses in Russia as regards total assets, total equity, customer accounts, and loan portfolio. Under International Accounting Standards, in December 2014, the assets of Alfa Banking Group — which comprises Alfa Bank as well as subsidiary banks and financial companies — totalled over forty-three billion dollars. By the end of 2014, Alfa Bank served over one-hundred-and-sixty thousand corporate customers and over eleven million private individuals. Alfa-Bank has over eight-hundred branches in Russia and abroad, including a subsidiary bank in the Netherlands, as well as financial subsidiaries in the United States, United Kingdom, and Cyprus. According to the bank’s website, in February 2014, Putin held a meeting with one of its owners, Petr Aven188, at his residence in Novo-Ogarevo. Putin and Aven discussed the: “Situation in the banking sector and current performance of the bank.” Aven also sits on the Board of Directors at LetterOne Group – also known as L1 Group, established in 2013 to invest in international projects in energy, telecommunications and technology. L1 acquired assets from German utility business E.ON in October 2015, in a deal worth over one-and-a-half billion dollars, which saw the Luxembourg-based group gain Norwegian oil and gas resources. The group also had significant interests in BP and the North Sea. By 2015, Aven was named as one of the richest people in the world, with a personal worth of around five billion dollars. The group made fourteen billion dollars alone from selling TNK-BP to Rosneft in 2013 and bought up student housing in the UK and shares in Uber before assessing additional investments.
In May 2017, Aven and his fellow Alfa Bank owners, Mikhail Fridman and German Khan, filed a defamation lawsuit against BuzzFeed for publishing the unedited and unverified Trump–Russia dossier of Steele189, which alleged financial ties and collusion between Putin, Trump, and the three bank owners. However, Alfa Bank also came to the notice of the media and the FBI when computer experts found its servers communicating with the Trump organisation before Donald was elected. A detailed analysis showed a series of DNS lookups between the Alfa Bank server in Moscow and a server owned by the Trump organisation, described as being set up in a peculiar fashion – it designed only to accept communications from a small number of other unique IP addresses. A private channel, in other words. From May the 4th until September the 23rd 2016, the Russian bank looked up the address to the Trump corporate server almost three thousand times – this was more traffic than from any other source190. In fact, Alfa Bank alone represented eighty percent of the lookups. Indiana University computer scientist, L. Jean Camp, told reporters: “The conversation between the Trump and Alfa servers appeared to follow the contours of political happenings in the United States. At election-related moments, the traffic peaked.”
“There were considerably more DNS lookups, for instance, during the two conventions,” Camp added.
According to CNN191: “Publicly available internet records show that address, which was registered to the Trump organisation, points to an IP address that lives on an otherwise dull machine operated by a company in the tiny rural town of Lititz, Pennsylvania.”
The Trump organisation claim it was a marketing server, however, Richard Clayton, a cybersecurity researcher at Cambridge University, commented on a series of objections to evidence of communication between the servers, saying “I think mail is more likely, because it’s going to a machine running a mail server and [the host] is called mail.” Others have also dismissed claims of the communication logs being faked to damage Trump due to an impossibility in recreating random traffic volume.
I did more research and found Listrak is the Lititz-based company. It is regularly hired to send emails on behalf of stores, hotels and other businesses. Apparently rapidly growing, the company sends more than two billion marketing emails a month to generate interest for its clients. Listrak Chief Executive Officer Ross Kramer told reporters192 the FBI came to the Listrak office before the November election and, though he declined to provide details on the FBI visit, he said “it was very cordial, and we’ve given them everything they need.” Kramer added Listrak was retained by a Florida company, Cendyn, which specialises in marketing for the hospitality industry and was working on behalf of Trump hotels.
What I subsequently found really odd was a statement from Cendyn193, which said: “A thorough network analysis conducted by Cendyn at the request of the Trump organisation determined an existing banking customer of Cendyn, completely unrelated to Trump, recently used Cendyn’s ‘Metron’ Meeting Management Application to send communication to AlfaBank.com.” The explanation defied all logic, in particular when the second highest number of DNS hits coming from Alfa Bank was aimed at Spectrum Health, which belongs to the family of Trump team stalwart Betsy DeVos.
Devos issued a completely different denial, saying the lookups related to “Voice over IP traffic.” To me, the pattern looked like a simplistic data transfer, with transmission periods from seconds to over an hour on a regular basis and a number of secretive, though benign, hackers have arrived at similar conclusions194. One, for example, stated: “When Spectrum connected to Trump Tower, Trump Tower’s next connect time was significantly longer, indicating Spectrum had modified a large chunk of records [which] had to be synced to Trump Tower, then pushed on to Alfa Bank. This detail was important in identifying that replication was in use. In this scenario, Trump Tower was functioning as a center-point, a data distribution center if you will.”
Less covertly, Christopher Davis, who runs cybersecurity firm HYAS InfoSec, told reporters “I’ve never seen a server set up like that. It looked we
ird, and it didn’t pass the sniff test.” Davis won the prestigious FBI Director Award for Excellence after tracking down the authors of one of the world’s nastiest botnet attacks. Another internet cyber-security pioneer, Paul Vixie, told Slate: “The parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive. This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project.”
Then, four days after New York Times journalists started following the story, on September the 27th 2016, the original server, mail1.trump-email.com, was switched off and the Trump organisation created a new hostname, trump1.contact-client.com. This simply enabled communication to the very same Alfa server via a different route. The new server’s first communication was, in fact, with Alfa Bank and experts have made clear “when a new hostname is created, the first communication with it is never random. To reach the server after the resetting of the host name, the sender of the first inbound mail has to first learn of the name somehow. It’s simply impossible to randomly reach a renamed server.”
This is where things started to come full circle from Mississippi to Russia, again. Jeffrey Birnbaum of Barbour’s BGR rejected allegations of communication between Trump’s team and the Russian bank, on behalf of Alfa195, saying: “Neither Alfa Bank nor its principals, including Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, have or have had any contact with Mr. Trump or his organisations. The assertion of a special or private link is patently false.” By the time I started to find all this out, the Sunday Times196 had long called the Bank’s parent company, Alfa Group, “one of the most controversial business empires on the planet.”
Alfa Bank financed one of the companies involved in building Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant, according to corporate documents and lobbying disclosure records. In the mid-2000s, according to its own public reports, Alfa Bank provided financing to Atomstroyexport, a state-controlled Russian company which was a major player in Iran’s developing nuclear energy program. The relationship included “loans and other client services.” At the time Birnbaum – of BGR – dismissed reports of Alfa having deeper links to Iran’s nuclear ambitions as misguided, saying: “Just because Alfa Bank had a line of credit with an entity that did business with Iran does not make Alfa a financier of Iran’s nuclear program.” Communicating through BGR, the bank’s CEO added that contact had ended “after 2008 U.N. sanctions.” At the time, there was no problem with the plant from a US foreign policy perspective. In fact, during 2007, while Alfa was financing Atomstroyexport, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice endorsed the plant as a proper component of Iran’s civilian nuclear program and, in 2010197, Hillary Clinton told the UN “Our problem is not with their reactor at Bushehr. Our problem is with their facilities at places like Natanz and their secret facility at Qom and other places where we believe they are conducting their weapons program.”
Alfa’s other owner, secretive oligarch Fridman, even freely enjoyed the privilege of visiting the White House twice, in May 2010 and again in May 2011. Each time, according to White House logs, Richard Burt, a former top diplomat who negotiated the 1991 START I nuclear treaty with the Soviet Union, accompanied him. According to Burt, Fridman’s goal was “to strengthen ties between the United States and Russia and to discuss Russian ascension to the World Trade organisation.”
Burt has longstanding connections with both BGR Group and Alfa. He was previously executive chairman of Diligence LLC, a corporate intelligence operation which employs former spies, and now holds an advisory role at Aven and Fridman’s investment operation, Letter One.
In 2005, BGR and Diligence became ensnared in scandal when, working as a BGR contractor, it was alleged they attempted to obtain corporate records of an Alfa rival from the auditor KPMG. As a result, KPMG sued Diligence198 and the latter settled the case by paying KPMG over one-and-a-half million dollars. Another rival, IPOC Growth Fund, also sued Diligence and BGR Group in a case which was settled in 2008. Ed Rogers, BGR chairman, was an early owner of Diligence and, according to reports, the company was actually set up inside BGR’s Pennsylvania Avenue office.
In the first two quarters of 2016, Burt’s lobbying firm received over three hundred and fifty thousand dollars for work he and a colleague did to garner support for a proposed natural-gas pipeline opposed by the Polish government and the Obama administration199. The Nord Steam gas connection would have allowed more Russian gas to reach central and western European markets – bypassing Ukraine and Belarus and extending Putin’s leverage over Europe. Burt’s lobbying work for New European Pipeline AG began in February 2016 when Russian state-owned oil giant Gazprom still owned only a fifty percent stake in the company. In August, however, five European partners pulled out and Gazprom now owns one-hundred percent. The Swedes, of course, were specifically concerned about details of the discussions around Nordstream being relayed from the Riksdag to Russia when the property scandal involving the Sweden Democrats and Putilov erupted.
During the same period, Burt says he also helped shape Trump’s first major foreign policy address, recommending the man who is now president take a “more realist, less interventionist approach to world affairs.” In the subsequent speech, Trump said “I believe an easing of tensions and improved relations with Russia — from a position of strength — is possible,” adding: “Common sense says this cycle of hostility must end. Some say the Russians won’t be reasonable. I intend to find out.”
It was obviously incestuous, to say the least, but when you look at the 2016 development of Alfa Bank’s L1 portfolio things become even clearer. LetterOne’s new L1 Health unit, which was to be based in the US, was announced in mid-2016 and was already working to identify investment targets, aided by an advisory board which included not only Burt, but Diageo Plc Chairman Franz Humer, a former chairman of the world’s largest manufacturer of cancer drugs, Roche Holding AG.
“Innovations in technology, biology, and genomics are changing the way we think about health-care treatments,” Fridman said of the project200, adding: “This enables us to look at health care in new and unique ways.”
One of Trump’s flagship policies was always the removal of so-called Obamacare and, server or not, it is now clear Trump was never far removed from Alfa Bank in any case. All of this, however, also led me right back to Arron Banks’ January 2017 photo of Phil Bryant – by then the Governor of Mississippi years after his private dinners with the Russians and Barbour – with Leave.EU’s Andy Wigmore.
Bryant had been close to Vice President Mike Pence for years, through the Republican Governor's Association, but his direct ties to Donald Trump were even clearer. By the end of the presidential election campaign, Bryant had swapped allegiance from Ted Cruz to become broadly referred to as one of the most reliable Trump surrogates. He also set to work raising two million dollars for Trump’s campaign in short order. Bryant subsequently enjoyed a close relationship with Trump, including visits to Trump Tower in New York, and commentators noted the then Presidential candidate often made a “B-line to Bryant even in a crowded room of VIPs.” According to one source201: “Trump even ditched his Secret Service detail to get on an elevator with Bryant in Trump Tower, then gave Bryant a personal tour of his war room.”
This also put Bryant in direct contact with Jeff Sessions.
While being interviewed by reporters in late 2016, Bryant had to cut one interview short, saying Sessions’ Chief of Staff, Rick Dearborn, had been meeting with Ivanka Trump to “work out calendars” and needed to update his itinerary. Rick Dearborn became the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Legislative, Intergovernmental Affairs and Implementation, having been the executive director of the Presidential Transition Team for Trump. He had spent more than twenty-five years working on Capitol Hill before this and, during that time, also worked on President George W. Bush's Energy Agenda. Dearborn worked as Chief of Staff for Jeff Sessions when the latter was a senator – from 2004 until 2016 when he joined the Trump team. He was, I’m told, the second Sessions staffer to land a seni
or role in the Trump White House.
One of the central issues in the investigation into Donald Trump and his relationship with Russia relates to Carter Page – a man whose CV largely consisted of doing financial business with Russia until Trump. Page was somewhat mysteriously hired by the Trump campaign as a foreign policy advisor, despite holding no qualifications for such a role. During the election, it became public knowledge the FBI was investigating Page’s ties to Russia and, after Trump’s success, Page travelled to Moscow for “unknown” reasons. In February 2017, it was discovered he had “been colluding with Russian intel officials during the election.” Spy agencies, including GCHQ, were not specifically targeting members of the Trump team but happened to gather evidence through what CNN reported202 as “incidental collection.” Their accidental intelligence was then passed to the US as part of a routine exchange under the so-called “Five Eyes” agreement between the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Page’s own direct connection to Jeff Sessions is not in doubt and, importantly, sources have also been publicly clear: “The Page connection was Rick Dearborn, Sessions’ chief of staff, who hired Page because Dearborn knew nothing about foreign policy but needed to put together a foreign policy staff for Trump’s Alexandria, Virginia, policy shop and he happened to know Page.”
Russian agents have not held back from commenting on Page either, highlighting his ambitions in the energy sector203. “He got hooked on Gazprom,” Victor Podobnyy, an officer of the SVR (Russia’s foreign intelligence agency) said. “It’s obvious that he wants to earn lots of money.”
Page, it appears, shared a mutual interest with Burt. Christopher Steele’s controversial intelligence dossier went further, alleging Page met with the head of Russian oil giant Rosneft, Igor Sechin – a man described as one of President Vladimir Putin’s key deputies. According to the report, Page and Sechin discussed lifting sanctions imposed on Russia as a result of its annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and “support of pro-Russian insurgents in eastern Ukraine.”
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