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    Watchdog Group Accuses Trump Campaign of Violating Finance Law

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    A campaign watchdog group filed a formal complaint to the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday accusing Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign and related political committees of concealing payments of $7.2 million in legal fees by paying them through an unrelated shell company in violation of campaign finance law.At the center of the complaint, from the Campaign Legal Center, is the company that received the payments, Red Curve. The company is run by Bradley Crate, who is also the treasurer for the Trump campaign and four related political committees listed in the complaint, as well as for 200 other candidates and committees.In its complaint, the Campaign Legal Center said that the Trump political committees had used Red Curve, which did not appear to offer legal services, “as a conduit to conceal payments for legal services.” The group filed its complaint hours after The Daily Beast published an article about the payments to Red Curve.Neither Red Curve nor representatives of the Trump campaign responded to a request for comment.“This apparent payment scheme, however, violates the reporting requirements of the Federal Election Campaign Act,” the complaint said, “which requires that committees provide detailed information about who they are paying for services, and how much they are paying for those services.”The complaint also said that Red Curve advanced payments for the legal costs to the Trump committees as part of the payment scheme, potentially violating a campaign finance law that prevents corporations from giving money to candidates.“What Red Curve was doing was basically making a contribution,” said Saurav Ghosh, the director of federal campaign finance reform at the Campaign Legal Center. “If it’s treated as a corporation under federal campaign finance law, then that’s illegal on its face.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Judge Narrows Trial of Analyst Who Gathered Steele Dossier Claims About Trump

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      Matters deemed tangential to the charges of making false statements, including a notorious and uncorroborated rumor of a sex tape, will be excluded from the case.WASHINGTON — John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel, set off political reverberations last year when he unveiled a lengthy indictment of an analyst he accused of lying to the F.B.I. about sources for the so-called Steele dossier, a discredited compendium of political opposition research about purported ties between Donald J. Trump and Russia.But the trial of the analyst, Igor Danchenko, which opens on Tuesday with jury selection in federal court in Alexandria, Va., now appears likely to be shorter and less politically salient than the sprawling narrative in Mr. Durham’s indictment had suggested the proceeding would be.In an 18-page order last week, the judge overseeing the case, Anthony J. Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia, excluded from the trial large amounts of information that Mr. Durham had wanted to showcase — including material that undercuts the credibility of the dossier’s notorious rumor that Russia had a blackmail tape of Mr. Trump with prostitutes.Certain facts Mr. Durham dug up related to that rumor “do not qualify as direct evidence as they are not ‘inextricably intertwined’ or ‘necessary to provide context’ to the relevant charge,” Judge Trenga wrote, adding that they “were substantially outweighed by the danger of confusion and unfair prejudice.”In that and other disputes over evidence, Judge Trenga, a George W. Bush appointee, almost always sided with Mr. Danchenko’s defense lawyers. Mr. Durham, they said, had tried to inject irrelevant issues into the trial in “an unnecessary and impermissible attempt to make this case about more than it is.”Judge Trenga’s ruling has pared down the larger significance of the trial, which is likely to be Mr. Durham’s final courtroom act before he retires as a longtime prosecutor. The grand jury that Mr. Durham has used to hear evidence has expired, suggesting he will bring no further indictments.Mr. Durham is also writing a report to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who succeeded the Trump administration official who appointed him as special counsel, William P. Barr.Judge Trenga’s ruling has pared down the significance of the trial, which is likely to be John H. Durham’s final courtroom act before he retires as a longtime prosecutor.Samuel Corum for The New York TimesThe dossier, which is at the heart of the Danchenko trial, attracted significant public attention when BuzzFeed published it in January 2017. Mr. Trump and his supporters frequently try to conflate it with the official Russia inquiry or falsely claim that it was the basis for the F.B.I.’s investigation.But the F.B.I. did not open the investigation based on the dossier, and the final report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, did not cite anything in it as evidence. The F.B.I. did cite some claims from the dossier in applying for court permission to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser with ties to Russia.The Spread of Misinformation and FalsehoodsElection Fraud Claims: A new report says that major social media companies continue to fuel false conspiracies about election fraud despite promises to combat misinformation ahead of the midterm elections.Russian Falsehoods: Kremlin conspiracy theories blaming the West for disrupting the global food supply have bled into right-wing chat rooms and mainstream conservative news media in the United States.Media Literacy Efforts: As young people spend more time online, educators are increasingly trying to offer students tools and strategies to protect themselves from false narratives.Global Threat: New research shows that nearly three-quarters of respondents across 19 countries with advanced economies are very concerned about false information online.The dossier grew out of opposition research indirectly funded by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Their law firm, Perkins Coie, contracted with the research firm Fusion GPS, which subcontracted research about Trump business dealings in Russia to a company run by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent.Mr. Steele in turn subcontracted to Mr. Danchenko, a Russian-born analyst living in the United States, who canvassed people he knew, including in Europe and Russia. Mr. Danchenko verbally relayed what the analyst later called “raw intelligence” — essentially uncorroborated gossip — to Mr. Steele, who drafted the dossier.A bureau counterintelligence analyst determined Mr. Danchenko’s identity and the F.B.I. first spoke to him in early 2017, during which he said he had not seen the dossier until BuzzFeed published it. Its tenor was more conclusive than was justified, he said, and he portrayed the blackmail tape story as mere rumor and speculation.Mr. Danchenko talked to the F.B.I. for hours about what he had gathered, and court filings by Mr. Durham disclosed that the bureau formally deemed him a confidential human source.An inspector general report revealed in late 2019 that Mr. Danchenko’s interview had raised doubts about the credibility of the dossier and criticized the bureau for failing to tell that to a court in wiretap renewal applications that continued to cite it. The report essentially portrayed Mr. Danchenko, whom it did not name, as a truth-teller, and the F.B.I. as deceptive.But after further investigation, Mr. Durham accused Mr. Danchenko of deceiving the F.B.I. — including by concealing that a public relations executive with ties to Democrats, Charles Dolan, had been his source for a minor claim involving office politics in the Trump campaign. That assertion made its way into the dossier.At the trial, Mr. Danchenko’s defense will apparently be that the F.B.I. asked him whether he had ever “talked” to Mr. Dolan about information in the dossier and that his somewhat equivocal denial was true: They had instead communicated by writing about that topic.Mr. Danchenko is accused of making false statements to the F.B.I.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesDefense lawyers had asked Judge Trenga to throw out the charge, arguing that the particular statute Mr. Danchenko had been charged with covers only affirmative misstatements, not misleading omissions. The judge has characterized that issue as a close call but let it go forward, while suggesting he could revisit the question later.Mr. Durham had also wanted to present striking but inconclusive evidence: In the summer of 2016, when Mr. Danchenko went to Moscow to gather rumors like the one about a purported sex tape, Mr. Dolan was staying at the hotel where the tape had supposedly been filmed three years earlier — and toured the suite where Mr. Trump had stayed.But Mr. Dolan told Mr. Durham’s team that he had never heard the tape rumor until BuzzFeed published the dossier, and Mr. Durham did not claim that Mr. Dolan was a source of the rumor. The judge excluded that information from the trial as irrelevant to the false statements Mr. Danchenko is charged with making.Mr. Durham also brought four false-statement charges against Mr. Danchenko related to accusations that he lied to the F.B.I. about a person he said had called and provided information without identifying himself.Mr. Danchenko told the F.B.I. he believed the caller had probably been Sergei Millian, a former president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, but Mr. Durham contends that is a lie and Mr. Danchenko never believed that.Like Mr. Steele, Mr. Millian is abroad; he refused to come to the United States to be a witness at the trial. The judge has also ruled inadmissible two emails Mr. Millian apparently wrote about Mr. Danchenko in 2020 denying that he talked to Mr. Danchenko.The “emails lack the necessary ‘guarantees of trustworthiness’ as the government does not offer direct evidence that Millian actually wrote the emails, and, even if he did, Millian possessed opportunity and motive to fabricate and/or misrepresent his thoughts,” the judge wrote.After Mr. Durham was assigned to investigate the Russia investigation in the spring of 2019, Mr. Trump and his supporters stoked expectations that Mr. Durham would uncover a “deep state” conspiracy against him and charge high-level F.B.I. and intelligence officials with crimes.But instead, Mr. Durham developed two cases on narrow charges of false statements involving outside efforts to uncover links between Mr. Trump and Russia. One was against Michael Sussmann, a lawyer with Democratic ties who was acquitted of lying to the F.B.I. when he shared a tip about possible connections between Mr. Trump and Russia. Another was against Mr. Danchenko.Mr. Durham filled court filings with copious amounts of information seemingly extraneous to the charges, while insinuating that Democrats had conspired to frame Mr. Trump for colluding with Russia.While that was not the theoretical conspiracy Mr. Trump and his supporters at outlets like Fox News had originally focused on, Mr. Durham’s filings provided fodder for them to stoke grievances about the Russia investigation. But judges in both cases have proved skeptical about putting much of that material before a jury.In both instances, however, Mr. Durham’s earlier filings had already made that information public.Mr. Danchenko was the subject of a counterintelligence investigation more than a decade ago, after the F.B.I. received a tip that he had made a remark that someone interpreted as an offer to buy classified information. He had also had contact with someone at the Russian embassy believed to be an intelligence officer. The bureau closed the case in 2011 without charging him.Mr. Danchenko — who made his name as a Russia analyst by bringing to light evidence that President Vladimir V. Putin likely plagiarized parts of his dissertation — has denied being a Russian agent and said he has no memory of the purported remark. For now, the judge has barred Mr. Durham’s team from introducing details about that inquiry, although prosecutors can tell the jury that there had been one.In an interview last month with the conservative Washington Examiner, Mr. Barr suggested that despite the special counsel’s limited achievements in the courtroom, the investigation was a success from another point of view.“I think Durham got out a lot of important facts that fill in a lot of the blanks as to what was really happening,” Mr. Barr said, adding that he expected “the Danchenko trial will also allow for a lot of this story to be told, whether or not he’s ultimately convicted.” More

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      Trump-Era Prosecutor’s Case Against Democratic-Linked Lawyer Goes to Trial

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      The first case developed by the special counsel, John Durham, involves a lawyer who is accused of lying when he shared a tip with the F.B.I. about possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia.WASHINGTON — When the Trump administration assigned a prosecutor in 2019 to scour the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing, President Donald J. Trump stoked expectations among his supporters that the inquiry would find a “deep state” conspiracy against him.Three years later, the team led by the special counsel, John H. Durham, on Monday will open the first trial in a case their investigation developed, bringing before a jury the claims and counterclaims that surrounded the 2016 presidential campaign. But rather than showing wrongdoing by the F.B.I., it is a case that portrays the bureau as a victim.The trial centers on whether Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer with ties to Democrats, lied to the F.B.I. in September 2016, when he relayed suspicions about possible cyberconnections between Mr. Trump and Russia. The F.B.I. looked into the matter, which involved a server for the Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank, and decided it was unsubstantiated.In setting up the meeting, Mr. Sussmann had told an F.B.I. official that he was not acting on behalf of any client. Prosecutors contend he concealed that a technology executive and the Hillary Clinton campaign were his clients to make the allegations seem more credible.The defense argues that Mr. Sussmann was not acting on their behalf at the meeting. The F.B.I. was aware that he had represented Democrats on matters related to Russia’s hacking of their servers, and subsequent communications made clear that he also had a client who had played a role in developing the data analysis concerning Alfa Bank, his lawyers say.While the charge against Mr. Sussmann is narrow, Mr. Durham has used it to release large amounts of information to insinuate that there was a broad conspiracy involving the Clinton campaign to essentially frame Mr. Trump for colluding with Russia.That insinuation also hangs over the other case Mr. Durham has developed, which is set to go to trial later this year. It accuses a researcher for the so-called Steele dossier — a since-discredited compendium of opposition research about purported links between Mr. Trump and Russia — of lying to the F.B.I. about some of his sources.Both cases have connections with the law firm Perkins Coie, where Mr. Sussmann worked then. One of his partners, Marc Elias, was the general counsel of the Clinton campaign and had commissioned opposition research that led to the Steele dossier.The Alfa Bank allegations and the Steele dossier were largely tangential to the official investigation into whether there was collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. F.B.I. officials had opened that investigation on other grounds, and the special counsel who completed the inquiry, Robert S. Mueller III, did not rely on either in his final report.(His report detailed “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign,” but he did not charge any Trump associate with a criminal conspiracy with Russia.)But supporters of Mr. Trump have rallied around Mr. Durham’s narrative, which resonates with Mr. Trump’s oft-repeated claim that the entire Russia investigation was a “hoax.”Defense lawyers for Mr. Sussmann have also rejected prosecutors’ broader insinuations about the constellation of events that led to his indictment, accusing the Durham team of fueling politicized conspiracy theories.Against that backdrop, much of the pretrial jostling has centered on how far afield prosecutors may roam from the core accusation. Judge Christopher Cooper of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, an Obama appointee, has imposed some limits on what Mr. Durham’s team may present to the jury.Through his court filings, Mr. Durham and his team have signaled that they suspect that the Alfa Bank data or analysis may have been faked, even though they were unable to prove it.But the judge barred Mr. Durham from presenting evidence or arguments along those lines, saying that unless there was proof Mr. Sussmann had reason to doubt the data when it was brought to him, there should not be “a time-consuming and largely unnecessary mini-trial to determine the existence and scope of an uncharged conspiracy.”Still, the judge has given prosecutors broader latitude to call witnesses associated with the Clinton campaign, including Mr. Elias and Robby Mook, the campaign manager.The Alfa Bank issue traces back to the spring of 2016, when it came to light that Russia had hacked Democrats.That summer, as suspicions escalated about Mr. Trump’s relationship with Moscow, a group of data scientists identified odd internet data that appeared to link servers for the Trump Organization to Alfa Bank.Working with Rodney Joffe, a technology executive and cybersecurity expert, they theorized that it might be a covert communications channel. Mr. Joffe, who was already a client of Mr. Sussmann’s, brought the matter to him, and Mr. Sussmann relayed those suspicions to reporters and the F.B.I. He also told Mr. Elias about it, and Clinton campaign officials were apparently aware that he was trying to get reporters to write about it.Seeking a meeting with the F.B.I. to share the material, Mr. Sussmann reached out to James A. Baker, then the agency’s top lawyer. Mr. Sussmann said in a text that he was not bringing it on behalf of any client and was motivated by a desire to help the bureau. Mr. Baker is expected to be a primary prosecution witness.But Mr. Durham’s team obtained law firm billing records showing that Mr. Sussmann had logged time working on the Alfa Bank suspicions to the Clinton campaign. The team argued that he lied because if the F.B.I. knew of the political connection, agents might have treated the matter differently.“The strategy, as the government will argue at trial, was to create news stories about this issue, about the Alfa Bank issue,” Andrew DeFilippis, a prosecutor for Mr. Durham, said at a recent hearing. “And second, it was to get law enforcement to investigate it; and perhaps third, your honor, to get the press to report on the fact that law enforcement was investigating it.”John H. Durham is the special counsel the Trump administration assigned in 2019 to scour the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing.Bob Child/Associated PressAt the same hearing, a defense lawyer, Sean Berkowitz, said that he would not contest that Mr. Sussmann represented the Clinton campaign in telling reporters about those allegations. But he suggested that the defense would contend that Mr. Sussmann did not believe he was taking the matter to the F.B.I. “on behalf” of the campaign or Mr. Joffe.Mr. Berkowitz noted that Mr. Sussmann had told Mr. Baker that he believed The New York Times planned to publish an article on the Alfa Bank suspicions, which was why he was reaching out.“We expect there to be testimony from the campaign that, while they were interested in an article on this coming out, going to the F.B.I. is something that was inconsistent with what they would have wanted before there was any press,” Mr. Berkowitz said. “And in fact, going to the F.B.I. killed the press story, which was inconsistent with what the campaign would have wanted.”Some details of that matter remain murky. Mr. Baker has testified that the F.B.I. tried to ask The Times “to slow down” on publishing. But news reports indicate that editors were not ready to run that article, which was being written by the reporter Eric Lichtblau, although the paper published one mentioning Alfa Bank six weeks later.Defense lawyers have also argued that even if Mr. Sussmann lied, it would have been immaterial because the F.B.I. would have still investigated the allegations. And they have suggested that despite his initial statement, Mr. Sussmann was open about having a client in subsequent communications. Notes of a March 2017 F.B.I. meeting with Mr. Baker show that the bureau understood he had one by then.The defense has also subpoenaed Mr. Lichtblau, who is no longer at The Times, to testify. A lawyer for Mr. Lichtblau has asked the judge to limit questioning to his discussions with Mr. Sussmann, avoiding other confidential sources and journalistic matters. Mr. Durham’s team is expected to object to any such constraint. More

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      What the Steele Dossier Reveals About the FBI

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      This month’s bombshell indictment of Igor Danchenko, the Russian national who is charged with lying to the F.B.I. and whose work turns out to have been the main source for Christopher Steele’s notorious dossier, is being treated as a major embarrassment for much of the news media — and, if the charges stick, that’s exactly what it is.Put media criticism aside for a bit. What this indictment further exposes is that James Comey’s F.B.I. became a Bureau of Dirty Tricks, mitigated only by its own incompetence — like a mash-up of Inspector Javert and Inspector Clouseau. Donald Trump’s best move as president (about which I was dead wrong at the time) may have been to fire him.If you haven’t followed the drip-drip-drip of revelations, late in 2019 Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, published a damning report detailing “many basic and fundamental errors” by the F.B.I. in seeking Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrants to surveil Carter Page, the American businessman fingered in the dossier as a potential link between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.Shortly afterward, Rosemary Collyer, the court’s presiding judge, issued her own stinging rebuke of the bureau: “The frequency with which representations made by F.B.I. personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other F.B.I. applications is reliable,” she wrote.Here a question emerged: Were the F.B.I.’s errors a matter of general incompetence or of bias? There appears to be a broad pattern of F.B.I. agents overstating evidence that corroborates their suspicions. That led to travesties such as the bureau hounding the wrong man in the 2001 anthrax attacks.But it turns out the bureau can be both incompetent and biased. When the F.B.I. applied for warrants to continue wiretapping Page, it already knew Page was helping the C.I.A., not the Russians. We know this because in August 2020 a former F.B.I. lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty to rewriting an email to hide Page’s C.I.A. ties.And why would Clinesmith do that? It certainly helped the bureau renew its wiretap warrants on Page, and, as he once put it in a text message to a colleague, “viva la resistance.” When the purpose of government service is to stop “the crazies” (one of Clinesmith’s descriptions of the elected administration) then the ends soon find a way of justifying the means.Which brings us to the grand jury indictment of Danchenko in the investigation being conducted by the special counsel John Durham. Danchenko was Steele’s main source for the most attention-grabbing claims in the dossier, including the existence of a likely mythical “pee tape.” Steele, in turn, wrote his report for Fusion GPS, an opposition-research outfit that had been hired by a Washington law firm close to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.Translation: The Steele dossier was Democratic Party-funded opposition research that had been sub-sub-sub-sub contracted to Danchenko, who now stands accused of repeatedly lying to the F.B.I. about his own sources while also having been investigated a decade ago for possible ties to Russian intelligence. Danchenko has pleaded not guilty and adamantly denies Russian intelligence ties, and he deserves his day in court. He describes the raw intelligence he collected for Steele as little more than a collection of rumors and innuendo and alleges that Steele dressed them up for Fusion GPS.Of such dross was spun years of high-level federal investigations, ponderous congressional hearings, pompous Adam Schiff soliloquies, and nonstop public furor. But none of that would likely have happened if the F.B.I. had treated the dossier as the garbage that it was, while stressing the ways in which Russia had sought to influence the election on Trump’s behalf, or the ways in which the Trump campaign (particularly through its onetime manager, Paul Manafort) was vulnerable to Russian blackmail.Instead, Comey used it as a political weapon by privately briefing President-elect Trump about it, despite ample warnings about the dossier’s credibility. In doing so, Comey made the existence of the “salacious and unverified” dossier news in its own right. And, as the University of Chicago’s Charles Lipson astutely notes, Comey’s briefing “could be seen as a kind of blackmail threat, the kind that marked J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure.”If you are a certain kind of reader — probably conservative — who has closely followed the Durham investigation, none of the above will come as news. But I’m writing this column for those who haven’t followed it closely, or who may have taken a keener interest in tales about Trump being Russia’s puppet than in evidence that, for all of his many and grave sins, he was the victim of a gigantic slander abetted by the F.B.I.Democrats who don’t want the vast power wielded by the bureau ever used against one of their own — as, after all, it was against Hillary Clinton — ought to use the Durham investigation as an opportunity to clean up, or clean out, the F.B.I. once and for all.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Trump Server's Connections to Alfa Bank Produces Fresh Conflict

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      A recent indictment suggested that researchers who found strange internet links between a Russian bank and the Trump Organization did not really believe their own work. They are pushing back.WASHINGTON — The charge was narrow: John H. Durham, the special counsel appointed by the Trump administration to scour the Russia investigation, indicted a cybersecurity lawyer this month on a single count of lying to the F.B.I.But Mr. Durham used a 27-page indictment to lay out a far more expansive tale, one in which four computer scientists who were not charged in the case “exploited” their access to internet data to develop an explosive theory about cyberconnections in 2016 between Donald J. Trump’s company and a Kremlin-linked bank — a theory, he insinuated, they did not really believe.Mr. Durham’s version of events set off reverberations beyond the courtroom. Trump supporters seized on the indictment, saying it shows that suspicions about possible covert communications between Russia’s Alfa Bank and Mr. Trump’s company were a deliberate hoax by supporters of Hillary Clinton and portraying it as evidence that the entire Russia investigation was unwarranted.Emails obtained by The New York Times and interviews with people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss issues being investigated by federal authorities, provide a fuller and more complex account of how a group of cyberexperts discovered the odd internet data and developed their hypothesis about what could explain it.At the same time, defense lawyers for the scientists say it is Mr. Durham’s indictment that is misleading. Their clients, they say, believed their hypothesis was a plausible explanation for the odd data they had uncovered — and still do.The Alfa Bank results “have been validated and are reproducible. The findings of the researchers were true then and remain true today; reports that these findings were innocuous or a hoax are simply wrong,” said Jody Westby and Mark Rasch, lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist and one of the researchers whom the indictment discussed but did not name.Steven A. Tyrrell, a lawyer for Rodney Joffe, an internet entrepreneur and another of the four data experts, said his client had a duty to share the information with the F.B.I. and that the indictment “gratuitously presents an incomplete and misleading picture” of his role.Mr. Durham’s indictment provided evidence that two participants in the matter — Mr. Joffe and Michael Sussmann, the cybersecurity lawyer accused of falsely saying he had no client when he brought the findings of the researchers to the F.B.I. — interacted with the Clinton campaign as they worked to bring their suspicions to journalists and federal agents.A spokesman for Mr. Durham declined to comment. The special counsel’s office issued a fresh grand jury subpoena to Mr. Sussmann’s former law firm, Perkins Coie, sometime after Mr. Sussmann was indicted on Sept. 16, in a development first reported on Thursday by CNN and confirmed by a person familiar with the matter. It is unclear whether the subpoena pertained to Alfa Bank or whether Mr. Durham has finished his investigation into that case.Mr. Durham uncovered law firm billing records showing that Mr. Sussmann, who represented the Democratic National Committee on issues related to Russia’s hacking of its servers, had logged his time on the Alfa Bank matter as work for the Clinton campaign. Mr. Sussmann has denied lying to the F.B.I. about who he was representing in coming forward with the Alfa Bank data, while saying he was representing only Mr. Joffe and not the campaign.Mr. Durham also found that Mr. Joffe had met with one of Mr. Sussmann’s law firm partners, Marc Elias, who was then the Clinton campaign’s general counsel, and researchers from Fusion GPS, an investigative firm Mr. Elias had commissioned to scrutinize Mr. Trump’s purported ties to Russia. Fusion GPS drafted a paper on Alfa Bank’s ties to the Kremlin that Mr. Sussmann also provided to the F.B.I.Mr. Durham was appointed in 2019 to scour the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing.Justice Department, via Associated PressIn the heat of the presidential race, Democrats quickly sought to capitalize on the research. On Sept. 15, four days before Mr. Sussmann met with the F.B.I. about the findings, Mr. Elias sent an email to the Clinton campaign manager, Robbie Mook, its communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, and its national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, whose subject line referred to an Alfa Bank article, the indictment said.Six weeks later, after Slate ran a lengthy article about the Alfa Bank suspicions, the Clinton campaign pounced. Mrs. Clinton’s Twitter feed linked to the article and ran an image stating the suspicions as fact, declaring, “It’s time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia.”The F.B.I., which had already started its Trump-Russia investigation before it heard about the possible Trump-Alfa connections, quickly dismissed the suspicions, apparently concluding the interactions were probably caused by marketing emails sent by an outside firm using a domain registered to the Trump Organization. The report by the Russia special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, ignored the issue.The data remains a mystery. A 2018 analysis commissioned by the Senate, made public this month, detailed technical reasons to doubt that marketing emails were the cause. A Senate report last year accepted the F.B.I.’s assessment that it was unlikely to have been a covert communications channel, but also said it had no good explanation for “the unusual activity.”Whatever caused the odd data, at issue in the wake of the indictment is whether Mr. Joffe and the other three computer scientists considered their own theory dubious and yet cynically went forward anyway, as Mr. Durham suggests, or whether they truly believed the data was alarming and put forward their hypothesis in good faith.Earlier articles on Alfa Bank, including in Slate and The New Yorker, did not name the researchers, and used pseudonyms like “Max” and “Tea Leaves” for two of them. Mr. Durham’s indictment did not name them, either.But three of their names have appeared among a list of data experts in a lawsuit brought by Alfa Bank, and Trump supporters have speculated online about their identities. The Times has confirmed them, and their lawyers provided statements defending their actions.The indictment’s “Originator-1” is April Lorenzen, chief data scientist at the information services firm Zetalytics. Her lawyer, Michael J. Connolly, said she has “dedicated her life to the critical work of thwarting dangerous cyberattacks on our country,” adding: “Any suggestion that she engaged in wrongdoing is unequivocally false.”The indictment’s “Researcher-1” is another computer scientist at Georgia Tech, Manos Antonakakis. “Researcher-2” is Mr. Dagon. And “Tech Executive-1” is Mr. Joffe, who in 2013 received the F.B.I. Director’s Award for helping crack a cybercrime case, and retired this month from Neustar, another information services company.In addition, the Alfa Bank suspicions were only half of what the researchers sought to bring to the government’s attention, according to several people familiar with the matter.Their other set of concerns centered on data suggesting that a YotaPhone — a Russian-made smartphone rarely seen in the United States — had been used from networks serving the White House, Trump Tower and Spectrum Health, a Michigan hospital company whose server had also interacted with the Trump server.Mr. Sussmann relayed their YotaPhone findings to counterintelligence officials at the C.I.A. in February 2017, the people said. It is not clear whether the government ever investigated them.The involvement of the researchers traces back to the spring of 2016. DARPA, the Pentagon’s research funding agency, wanted to commission data scientists to develop the use of so-called DNS logs, records of when servers have prepared to communicate with other servers over the internet, as a tool for hacking investigations.DARPA identified Georgia Tech as a potential recipient of funding and encouraged researchers there to develop examples. Mr. Antonakakis and Mr. Dagon reached out to Mr. Joffe to gain access to Neustar’s repository of DNS logs, people familiar with the matter said, and began sifting them.Separately, when the news broke in June 2016 that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee’s servers, Mr. Dagon and Ms. Lorenzen began talking at a conference about whether such data might uncover other election-related hacking.Ms. Lorenzen eventually noticed an odd pattern: a server called mail1.trump-email.com appeared to be communicating almost exclusively with servers at Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health. She shared her findings with Mr. Dagon, the people said, and they both discussed it with Mr. Joffe.As a candidate in 2016, President Trump publicly called for Russia to hack Hillary Clinton.Todd Heisler/The New York Times“Half the time I stop myself and wonder: am I really seeing evidence of espionage on behalf of a presidential candidate?” Mr. Dagon wrote in an email to Mr. Joffe on July 29, after WikiLeaks made public stolen Democratic emails timed to disrupt the party’s convention and Mr. Trump urged Russia to hack Mrs. Clinton. By early August, the researchers had combined forces and were increasingly focusing on the Alfa Bank data, the people said. Mr. Joffe reached out to his lawyer, Mr. Sussmann, who would take the researchers’ data and hypothesis to the F.B.I. on Sept. 19, 2016.Defense lawyers contend the indictment presented a skewed portrait of their clients’ thinking by selectively quoting from their emails.The indictment quotes August emails from Ms. Lorenzen and Mr. Antonakakis worrying that they might not know if someone had faked the DNS data. But people familiar with the matter said the indictment omitted later discussion of reasons to doubt any attempt to spoof the overall pattern could go undetected.The indictment says Mr. Joffe sent an email on Aug. 21 urging more research about Mr. Trump, which he stated could “give the base of a very useful narrative,” while also expressing a belief that the Trump server at issue was “a red herring” and they should ignore it because it had been used by the mass-marketing company.The full email provides context: Mr. Trump had claimed he had no dealings in Russia and yet many links appeared to exist, Mr. Joffe noted, citing an article that discussed aspirations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Despite the “red herring” line, the same email also showed that Mr. Joffe nevertheless remained suspicious about Alfa Bank, proposing a deeper hunt in the data “for the anomalies that we believe exist.”He wrote: “If we can show possible email communication between” any Trump server and an Alfa Bank server “that has occurred in the last few weeks, we have the beginning of a narrative,” adding that such communications with any “Russian or Ukrainian financial institutions would give the base of a very useful narrative.”Mr. Tyrrell, his lawyer, said that research in the weeks that followed, omitted by the indictment, had yielded evidence that the specific subsidiary server in apparent contact with Alfa Bank had not been used to send bulk marketing emails. That further discussion, he said, changed his client’s mind about whether it was a red herring.“The quotation of the ‘red herring’ email is deeply misleading,” he said, adding: “The research process is iterative and this is exactly how it should work. Their efforts culminated in the well-supported conclusions that were ultimately delivered to the F.B.I.”Michael E. Sussmann during a cybersecurity conference in 2016. He was charged by Mr. Durham with lying to the F.B.I.via C-SPANThe indictment also quoted from emails in mid-September, when the researchers were discussing a paper on their suspicions that Mr. Sussmann would soon take to the F.B.I. It says Mr. Joffe asked if the paper’s hypothesis would strike security experts as a “plausible explanation.”The paper’s conclusion was somewhat qualified, an email shows, saying “there were other possible explanations,” but the only “plausible” one was that Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization had taken steps “to obfuscate their communications.”The indictment suggested Ms. Lorenzen’s reaction to the paper was guarded, describing an email from her as “stating, in part, that it was ‘plausible’ in the ‘narrow scope’ defined by” Mr. Joffe. But the text of her email displays enthusiasm.“In the narrow scope of what you have defined above, I agree wholeheartedly that it is plausible,” she wrote, adding: “If the white paper intends to say that there are communications between at least Alfa and Trump, which are being intentionally hidden by Alfa and Trump I absolutely believe that is the case,” her email said.The indictment cited emails by Mr. Antonakakis in August in which he flagged holes and noted they disliked Mr. Trump, and in September in which he approvingly noted that the paper did not get into a technical issue that specialists would raise.Mr. Antonakakis’ lawyer, Mark E. Schamel, said his client had provided “feedback on an early draft of data that was cause for additional investigation.” And, he said, their hypothesis “to this day, remains a plausible working theory.”The indictment also suggests Mr. Dagon’s support for the paper’s hypothesis was qualified, describing his email response as “acknowledging that questions remained, but stating, in substance and in part, that the paper should be shared with government officials.”The text of that email shows Mr. Dagon was forcefully supportive. He proposed editing the paper to declare as “fact” that it was clear “that there are hidden communications between Trump and Alfa Bank,” and said he believed the findings met the probable cause standard to open a criminal investigation.“Hopefully the intended audience are officials with subpoena powers, who can investigate the purpose” of the apparent Alfa Bank connection, Mr. Dagon wrote.In the end, Mr. Durham came to investigate them. More