Election security

New NYT scoop on Russia raises questions about old NYT story on Russia

It was a week before the 2016 presidential election that the New York Times wrote this headline: “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” The story’s lead cited the curiosity of federal law enforcement on this front: “For much of the summer, the F.B.I. pursued a widening investigation into a Russian role in the American presidential campaign,” read the story by Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers. “Agents scrutinized advisers close to Donald J. Trump, looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, searched for those involved in hacking the computers of Democrats, and even chased a lead — which they ultimately came to doubt — about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank.”

Topical stuff. Major media outlets had been following strands of the Trump-Russia story for months. Just before the Lichtblau-Myers collaboration hit the Internet, for example, Slate ran a detailed story asking whether a server of the Trump Organization was communicating with Moscow’s Alfa Bank. Perhaps, concluded the story.