title: mike pence is fine with trump sexual assault but offended by voter suppression
text: by sean colarossi on mon oct st  at  pm while the media continues to focus on the clinton email nonstory news about donald trumps ties to russia continues to gain steam share on twitter print this post 
  while the media continues to focus on what is increasingly becoming a nonstory  fbi director james comeys vague letter regarding more emails related to hillary clinton  news about donald trumps ties to russia continues to gain steam 
  not only did nbc just report that the fbi is now in the preliminary stages of investigating trumps excampaign managers connection to russia but slate also reported on monday that a trump server may have repeatedly been communicating with a russian bank 
  slate claims that while a group of computer scientists was looking into the russian cyber attack of the dnc they stumbled onto something unexpectedly 
  the report 
  in late july one of these scientistswho 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 datafound 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 happenstancea 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 couldnt 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 servers dns activity as he collected the logs he would circulate them in periodic batches to colleagues in the cybersecurity world six of them began scrutinizing them for clues 
  the researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack the communication wasnt the work of bots the irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversationconversations that began during office hours in new york and continued during office hours in moscow it dawned on the researchers that this wasnt an attack but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the trump organization and two servers registered to an entity called alfa bank 
  this news doesnt come out of nowhere trump has repeatedly praised vladimir putin as a strong leader all while taking prorussia positions throughout the campaign that come straight off a kremlin wishlist 
  the clinton campaign was quick to jump on the report in a statement by clinton senior policy adviser jake sullivan 
  this secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of trumps ties to russia it certainly seems the trump organization felt it had something to hide given that it apparently took steps to conceal the link when it was discovered by journalists 
  this line of communication may help explain trumps bizarre adoration of vladimir putin and endorsement of so many prokremlin positions throughout this campaign it raises even more troubling questions in light of russias masterminding of hacking efforts that are clearly intended to hurt hillary clintons campaign we can only assume that federal authorities will now explore this direct connection between trump and russia as part of their existing probe into russias meddling in our elections 
  trumps prorussia rhetoric and policy positions are not a coincidence the more information that comes out the clearer it is that the republican nominee has connections to russia that he is hiding from voters 
  with just a week until election day this is the explosive story the media should be focusing on its critical that the american people know what kind of financial ties a potential president has with an american adversary especially when that adversary is russia