A Judge Rules That Trump Isn’t Above the Law—and Neither Are His Tax Returns

By John Cassidy

In the past two and a half years, Donald Trump’s enablers have made a number of outlandish claims, but perhaps none of them was quite as preposterous as the one that his lawyers made last month, in an effort to prevent New York state prosecutors from obtaining eight years of his tax returns.

In a filing to a federal court in New York, the Trump legal team, including Marc Mukasey, a son of Michael Mukasey, who served as Attorney General during the George W. Bush Administration, argued that, under the U.S. Constitution, a sitting President can’t be subjected to any criminal investigation except as part of an impeachment inquiry. The team’s argument was not merely that Trump can’t be hauled into court and prosecuted—a claim that now has the imprimatur of the U.S. Department of Justice—but that a President can’t be subjected to any type of “criminal process,” because it would “distract him from his constitutional duties.”

A number of independent legal experts quickly pointed out that Trump’s lawyers were trying to rewrite the Constitution to create a whole new layer of executive protection and privilege. “I think there is some force to the argument that states can’t be allowed to hobble presidents with local prosecutions, but there is certainly no authority for the claim that they cannot at least investigate while a president is in office,” Frank O. Bowman, a University of Missouri law professor who has written a book about impeachment, told the Times.

On Monday morning, the federal judge Victor Marrero, who was appointed to the bench by Bill Clinton, came down firmly on the side of Bowman and against Trump. “The president asserts an extraordinary claim in the dispute now before this court,” Marrero wrote. “This Court cannot endorse such a categorical and limitless assertion of presidential immunity from judicial process as being countenanced by the nation’s constitutional plan.”

In dismissing a request from Trump’s lawyers for a preliminary injunction to prevent Cyrus Vance, the District Attorney for Manhattan, from getting hold of the tax returns, Marrero rejected their legal arguments in a long and, at times, impassioned ruling. “Bared to its core, the proposition the President advances reduces to the very notion that the Founders rejected at the inception of the Republic, and that the Supreme Court has since unequivocally repudiated: that a constitutional domain exists in this country in which not only the President, but, derivatively, relatives and persons and business entities associated with him in potentially unlawful private activities, are in fact above the law,” Marrero stated. “Because this Court finds aspects of such a doctrine repugnant to the nation’s governmental structure and constitutional values, and for the reasons further stated below, it ABSTAINS from adjudicating this dispute and DISMISSES the President’s suit.”

The dispute arose after Vance issued a subpoena to Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA L.L.P., demanding that the firm hand over the President’s tax returns, which Trump has refused to make public. Vance’s office is investigating whether the 2016 hush-money payoff made to the adult-film performer Stormy Daniels, through Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen, violated state law. (Trump has denied both having an affair with Daniels and that the payment violated any campaign-finance laws.) Late last year, Cohen pleaded guilty in federal court to eight criminal counts, including violating campaign-finance laws by giving Daniels a hundred and thirty thousand dollars to buy her silence, and was sentenced to three years in prison. Earlier this year, it was widely reported that the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York wouldn’t be bringing any more charges in the Daniels case, despite the fact that it had identified in court documents an “Individual 1,” widely agreed to be Trump, who had directed Cohen to make the hush-money payments.

Trump and his lawyers have accused Vance, who is a Democrat, of launching the state investigation of the Daniels case for political reasons. “Throughout President Trump’s time in office, government institutions, both federal and state, controlled by or aligned with the Democratic Party have attempted to use their power to obtain and expose his confidential financial information in order to harass him, intimidate him, and prevent his reelection,” the Trump team’s lawsuit said. “In recent months, the District Attorney of New York County has joined this campaign of harassing the President by obtaining and exposing his financial information.”

Shortly after Judge Marrero issued his ruling, Trump, in a tweet, amplified this argument in his usual distinct and self-pitying manner. “The Radical Left Democrats have failed on all fronts, so now they are pushing local New York City and State Democrat prosecutors to go get President Trump. A thing like this has never happened to any President before. Not even close!”

Judge Marrero’s task was to rule on the law, not Vance’s motivation. In his ruling, which stretched to seventy-five pages, he said that he couldn’t “impute bad faith to the District Attorney on the basis of statements made by various legislators and the New York Attorney General”—Letitia James, who had campaigned last year, in part, on a promise to investigate Trump. Marrero noted that the President’s lawyers had not asserted that Vance and his team lacked any “reasonable expectation” of obtaining a favorable outcome in their investigation of the hush-money payments, which extends beyond Trump individually to the Trump Organization.

The judge also noted that Trump’s legal team, in claiming that the President couldn’t be investigated, had placed a lot of emphasis on internal Department of Justice guidelines, which say that a President can’t be prosecuted while in office. But “the DOJ Memos do not constitute authoritative judicial interpretation of the Constitution concerning those issues,” Marrero wrote. “In fact, as the DOJ Memos themselves also concede, the precise presidential immunity questions this litigation raises have never been squarely presented or fully addressed by the Supreme Court.” Although Marrero obviously doesn’t speak for the high court, he did consider the constitutional arguments that Trump’s team had raised, and dismissed them, saying: “The Court concludes that neither the Constitution nor the history surrounding the founding support as broad an interpretation of presidential immunity as the one now espoused by the President.”

Marrero seemed well aware that his wouldn’t be the final word in this legal battle, and he was quickly proved right. Shortly after he issued his ruling, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals granted Trump’s lawyers a temporary stay, which meant his accounting firm didn’t have to hand over his tax returns immediately. The Appeals Court said that it would review the case on an expedited basis, and the Justice Department said that it would join the proceedings and make arguments on the President’s behalf.

It seems likely that the case will go all the way to the Supreme Court, where there is a solid conservative majority. But, for today, at least, a federal court has reasserted a fundamental principle: no President is above the law.

Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Debate About the Best Way to Get Donald Trump Out of Office

By Amy Davidson Sorkin

 

As Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi roamed Normandy on Thursday (she had brought along a contingent of dozens of members of Congress for the official commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of D Day, including veterans from both sides of the aisle), her party was debating what it meant to want someone behind bars. Was it too tough, or not tough enough? Politico had reported that, in a meeting of “top Democrats,” on Tuesday night, Representative Jerrold Nadler, of New York, had argued in favor of having the Judiciary Committee, which he chairs, begin proceedings for the impeachment of President Donald Trump. Politico cited “multiple Democratic sources familiar with the meeting” who said that Pelosi demurred, telling Nadler, “I don’t want to see him impeached. I want to see him in prison.”

 How did “lock him up” become a motto for forbearance and patience? The logic here is that it is constitutionally complicated to indict a sitting President. Indeed, Robert Mueller, the special counsel whose investigation of Russian meddling in the election and related matters is now closed, believed that Justice Department guidance precluded him from making such a move. (If he had done so, the crime would almost certainly have concerned obstruction of justice, rather than collusion.) The calculation would be different, obviously, if Trump were not President. And, as it happens, there is an election next year, which could lead, fairly quickly, to his exit from the White House. In other words, the way to hold him to account criminally is to first hold him to account electorally.

But, others in the Democratic Party say, impeachment is also a way to remove a President from office. That is, indeed, the means to do so that the Constitution gives to Congress. The Democrats view Pelosi as overly cautious. Trump, being a bully, has begun insulting Pelosi in terms that he apparently thinks will get those close to her to turn against her. In Normandy, shortly before Trump delivered his remarks, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham asked him about the prospect of Mueller testifying before Congress. Trump replied that Mueller had “made a fool of himself” in the past. (The backdrop for those remarks was a field full of the graves of fallen soldiers; Pelosi, in her own interview with Andrea Mitchell, on MSNBC, said that talking about impeachment wasn’t why she had come to France. She also praised Europe’s “spirit of collaboration.”) Trump added, “Nancy Pelosi—I call her Nervous Nancy—Nancy Pelosi doesn’t talk about it. She’s a disaster. She’s a disaster. Let her do what she wants—you know what? I think they’re in big trouble.”

And they think he’s in big trouble. At this point, though, it would be hard to find many people who believe that, if the Democratic-controlled House passes bills of impeachment—an indictment, in effect—the Senate would convict him, which is the role that the Constitution gives to that body. There may be wishful thinking about evidence emerging that is so shocking that Senator Lindsey Graham stops his games of golf and flattery with the President (Pelosi has also suggested that members of her caucus wait for such a moment), but it would be reckless to launch such an operation under the assumption that it would. For one thing, on the subject of Trump, this group of Republicans doesn’t seem to shock easily. The ones who do tend to retire, either with an impassioned speech or by just slinking away. Campaigns are messy, but, if the goal is removing Trump, an election may be more efficient than removal by impeachment, and also more democratic, in the end.

And isn’t that the Democrats’ goal? The odd thing about Pelosi’s reported prison comment is that the purpose and the measures it offers seem blurred. Is the point really just to find whatever is the best way, electoral or legislative, to lock Trump up, yielding an emotionally satisfying mug shot of him and elegant photos of Melania sitting behind the defendants’ table? Is it to get back at him, in the name of proving that there is justice in the world? Or is it to make sure that, in January of 2021, there is a new President in the White House who can actually deliver justice, particularly to vulnerable populations? If the Democrats win in 2020, how much does it matter what happens to Trump next? Perhaps quite a lot; accountability and truth could use some bolstering. But it might be worth recognizing that this isn’t such a simple question.

Trump’s demands at his rallies to jail any number of people who have opposed him have been far wilder than anything that Pelosi has said. Those calls have also caused people on all sides to recoil, rightly, at the idea that imprisonment is somehow the normal price for political defeat. Of course, Trump’s targets—reporters, for example, in addition to Democratic politicians—have not been all but accused of obstruction of justice by a special counsel. For some, Trump presents their purported crime as simply not being nice to him. Still, it would be good for Democrats to consider where they want to go with the prison-or-impeachment talk, and why. To put it another way, what is the least Trumpian, most Trumpism-defeating way to try to insure that Trump is not President for another term?

How Did the F.A.A. Allow the Boeing 737 Max to Fly?

By John Cassidy

With virtually every day that has passed since the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which killed a hundred and fifty-seven people, more disturbing news has emerged. On Sunday, a spokesperson for Ethiopia’s ministry of transport said that the black box that was recovered from the wreckage of Flight 302 indicated that “clear similarities were noted between Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 and Indonesian Lion Air Flight 610,” which crashed last October, killing a hundred and eighty-nine people.

The plane involved in the Lion Air tragedy was also a Boeing 737 Max 8, and investigators suspect that the cause of that crash was a malfunctioning automated-flight-control feature, which caused the aircraft’s nose to dip repeatedly during its initial ascent out of the airport in Jakarta. The automated-flight-control feature on the 737 Max, which is called a Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), was designed to prevent a high-speed stall. It works by tilting part of the horizontal stabilizer in the tail of the plane, and investigators at the Ethiopian crash site have found physical evidence that this part of the plane was, indeed, configured to dive.

Radar data has indicated that both planes jerked up and down in erratic fashion after takeoff. The captain of the Ethiopian Airlines flight reported a “flight control” problem to the air-traffic control tower. Data from the black box of the Lion Air plane showed that its pilots repeatedly pulled back on the control yoke to try to disengage the MCAS and level the flight path of the plane. “The pilots fought continuously until the end of the flight,” an official from the Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee said in November, after the plane’s black box was recovered.

This is all frightening enough, and it raises serious questions about why Boeing didn’t tell airlines and pilots much more about the MCAS—in particular, how to disengage it in an emergency—before the 737 Max was put into service in 2017. Boeing has delivered three hundred and seventy-six of these planes to airlines around the world. Practically all of them have now been grounded out of safety concerns.

Boeing has promised a software fix to address some of the potential problems created by the MCAS. That’s too little, too late, of course, and it doesn’t address the even larger issue of how the 737 Max was allowed to fly in the first place. On Sunday, the Seattle Times, the home-town newspaper of Boeing’s commercial division, published the results of a lengthy investigation into the federal certification of the 737 Max. It found that the F.A.A. outsourced key elements of the certification process to Boeing itself, and that Boeing’s safety analysis of the new plane contained some serious flaws, including several relating to the MCAS.

The Boeing analysis “understated the power of the new flight control system,” the Seattle Times article said. “When the planes later entered service, MCAS was capable of moving the tail more than four times farther than was stated in the initial safety analysis document.” The Boeing analysis also “failed to account for how the system could reset itself each time a pilot responded, thereby missing the potential impact of the system repeatedly pushing the airplane’s nose downward.”

In the case of the Lion Air flight, investigators suspect the MCAS was reacting to faulty data gathered from a single flight sensor mounted on the fuselage. According to the Seattle Times article, the Boeing analysis assessed the failure of the MCAS system as “as one level below ‘catastrophic.’ But even that ‘hazardous’ danger level should have precluded activation of the system based on input from a single sensor—and yet that’s how it was designed.”

How can a manufacturer of something as complex and potentially dangerous as a passenger jet be allowed to play such a large role in deciding whether its product is safe? It turns out that the F.A.A., with congressional approval, has “over the years delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes,” the Seattle Times said. In the case of the 737 Max, which is a longer and more fuel-efficient version of previous 737s, Boeing was particularly eager to get the plane into service quickly, so it could compete with Airbus’s new A320neo.

Early on, employees of the F.A.A. and Boeing decided how to divide up the certification work. But halfway through the process “we were asked by management to re-evaluate what would be delegated,” a former F.A.A. safety engineer told the Seattle Times. “Management thought we had retained too much at the FAA:”

“There was constant pressure to re-evaluate our initial decisions,” the former engineer said. “And even after we had reassessed it … there was continued discussion by management about delegating even more items down to the Boeing Company.”

Even the work that was retained, such as reviewing technical documents provided by Boeing, was sometimes curtailed.

“There wasn’t a complete and proper review of the documents,” the former engineer added. “Review was rushed to reach certain certification dates.
The new revelations don’t stop there. “Federal prosecutors and Department of Transportation officials are scrutinizing the development of Boeing Co.’s 737 MAX jetliners,” the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. “A grand jury in Washington, D.C., issued a broad subpoena dated March 11 to at least one person involved in the 737 MAX’s development, seeking related documents, including correspondence, emails and other messages,” a source told the paper. (The Justice Department and Department of Transportation declined to comment on the Journal’s reporting.)

The criminal investigation began well before the crash of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight. It’s not clear yet whether it is focussing on the MCAS system, the report in the Journal said. But, that article added, “In the U.S., it is highly unusual for federal prosecutors to investigate details of regulatory approval of commercial aircraft designs, or to use a criminal probe to delve into dealings between the FAA and the largest aircraft manufacturer the agency oversees. Probes of airliner programs or alleged lapses in federal safety oversight typically are handled as civil cases, often by the DOT inspector general.”

In a statement to the Seattle Times, Boeing said that the F.A.A. “considered the final configuration and operating parameters of MCAS during MAX certification, and concluded that it met all certification and regulatory requirements.” The F.A.A., in a statement issued on Sunday, said that the “737 MAX certification program followed the FAA’s standard certification process.”

Given that two brand-new 737 Maxes have plunged to earth, befuddling their pilots and costing three hundred and forty-six people their lives, these statements are hardly reassuring. We need to know a lot more about how the FAA allowed this plane to take to the air.

How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet

With wildfires, heat waves, and rising sea levels, large tracts of the earth are at risk of becoming uninhabitable. But the fossil-fuel industry continues its assault on the facts.

By Bill McKibben

Thirty years ago, this magazine published “The End of Nature,” a long article about what we then called the greenhouse effect. I was in my twenties when I wrote it, and out on an intellectual limb: climate science was still young. But the data were persuasive, and freighted with sadness. We were spewing so much carbon into the atmosphere that nature was no longer a force beyond our influence—and humanity, with its capacity for industry and heedlessness, had come to affect every cubic metre of the planet’s air, every inch of its surface, every drop of its water. Scientists underlined this notion a decade later when they began referring to our era as the Anthropocene, the world made by man.

I was frightened by my reporting, but, at the time, it seemed likely that we’d try as a society to prevent the worst from happening. In 1988, George H. W. Bush, running for President, promised that he would fight “the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” He did not, nor did his successors, nor did their peers in seats of power around the world, and so in the intervening decades what was a theoretical threat has become a fierce daily reality. As this essay goes to press, California is ablaze. A big fire near Los Angeles forced the evacuation of Malibu, and an even larger fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, has become the most destructive in California’s history. After a summer of unprecedented high temperatures and a fall “rainy season” with less than half the usual precipitation, the northern firestorm turned a city called Paradise into an inferno within an hour, razing more than ten thousand buildings and killing at least sixty-three people; more than six hundred others are missing. The authorities brought in cadaver dogs, a lab to match evacuees’ DNA with swabs taken from the dead, and anthropologists from California State University at Chico to advise on how to identify bodies from charred bone fragments.

For the past few years, a tide of optimistic thinking has held that conditions for human beings around the globe have been improving. Wars are scarcer, poverty and hunger are less severe, and there are better prospects for wide-scale literacy and education. But there are newer signs that human progress has begun to flag. In the face of our environmental deterioration, it’s now reasonable to ask whether the human game has begun to falter—perhaps even to play itself out. Late in 2017, a United Nations agency announced that the number of chronically malnourished people in the world, after a decade of decline, had started to grow again—by thirty-eight million, to a total of eight hundred and fifteen million, “largely due to the proliferation of violent conflicts and climate-related shocks.” In June, 2018, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. found that child labor, after years of falling, was growing, “driven in part by an increase in conflicts and climate-induced disasters.”

In 2015, at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris, the world’s governments, noting that the earth has so far warmed a little more than one degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels, set a goal of holding the increase this century to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), with a fallback target of two degrees (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). This past October, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a special report stating that global warming “is likely to reach 1.5 C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate.” We will have drawn a line in the sand and then watched a rising tide erase it. The report did not mention that, in Paris, countries’ initial pledges would cut emissions only enough to limit warming to 3.5 degrees Celsius (about 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, a scale and pace of change so profound as to call into question whether our current societies could survive it.

Scientists have warned for decades that climate change would lead to extreme weather. Shortly before the I.P.C.C. report was published, Hurricane Michael, the strongest hurricane ever to hit the Florida Panhandle, inflicted thirty billion dollars’ worth of material damage and killed forty-five people. President Trump, who has argued that global warming is “a total, and very expensive, hoax,” visited Florida to survey the wreckage, but told reporters that the storm had not caused him to rethink his decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate accords. He expressed no interest in the I.P. C.C. report beyond asking “who drew it.” (The answer is ninety-one researchers from forty countries.) He later claimed that his “natural instinct” for science made him confident that the climate would soon “change back.” A month later, Trump blamed the fires in California on “gross mismanagement of forests.”

Human beings have always experienced wars and truces, crashes and recoveries, famines and terrorism. We’ve endured tyrants and outlasted perverse ideologies. Climate change is different. As a team of scientists recently pointed out in the journal Nature Climate Change, the physical shifts we’re inflicting on the planet will “extend longer than the entire history of human civilization thus far.”

“His last words were ‘Yodel-ay-he-hoo.’ ”

The poorest and most vulnerable will pay the highest price. But already, even in the most affluent areas, many of us hesitate to walk across a grassy meadow because of the proliferation of ticks bearing Lyme disease which have come with the hot weather; we have found ourselves unable to swim off beaches, because jellyfish, which thrive as warming seas kill off other marine life, have taken over the water. The planet’s diameter will remain eight thousand miles, and its surface will still cover two hundred million square miles. But the earth, for humans, has begun to shrink, under our feet and in our minds.
 

“Climate change,” like “urban sprawl” or “gun violence,” has become such a familiar term that we tend to read past it. But exactly what we’ve been up to should fill us with awe. During the past two hundred years, we have burned immense quantities of coal and gas and oil—in car motors, basement furnaces, power plants, steel mills—and, as we have done so, carbon atoms have combined with oxygen atoms in the air to produce carbon dioxide. This, along with other gases like methane, has trapped heat that would otherwise have radiated back out to space.

There are at least four other episodes in the earth’s half-billion-year history of animal life when CO₂ has poured into the atmosphere in greater volumes, but perhaps never at greater speeds. Even at the end of the Permian Age, when huge injections of CO₂ from volcanoes burning through coal deposits culminated in “The Great Dying,” the CO₂ content of the atmosphere grew at perhaps a tenth of the current pace. Two centuries ago, the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere was two hundred and seventy-five parts per million; it has now topped four hundred parts per million and is rising more than two parts per million each year. The extra heat that we trap near the planet every day is equivalent to the heat from four hundred thousand bombs the size of the one that was dropped on Hiroshima.

As a result, in the past thirty years we’ve seen all twenty of the hottest years ever recorded. The melting of ice caps and glaciers and the rising levels of our oceans and seas, initially predicted for the end of the century, have occurred decades early. “I’ve never been at . . . a climate conference where people say ‘that happened slower than I thought it would,’ ” Christina Hulbe, a New Zealand climatologist, told a reporter for Grist last year. This past May, a team of scientists from the University of Illinois reported that there was a thirty-five-per-cent chance that, because of unexpectedly high economic growth rates, the U.N.’s “worst-case scenario” for global warming was too optimistic. “We are now truly in uncharted territory,” David Carlson, the former director of the World Meteorological Organization’s climate-research division, said in the spring of 2017, after data showed that the previous year had broken global heat records.

We are off the literal charts as well. In August, I visited Greenland, where, one day, with a small group of scientists and activists, I took a boat from the village of Narsaq to a glacier on a nearby fjord. As we made our way across a broad bay, I glanced up at the electronic chart above the captain’s wheel, where a blinking icon showed that we were a mile inland. The captain explained that the chart was from five years ago, when the water around us was still ice. The American glaciologist Jason Box, who organized the trip, chose our landing site. “We called this place the Eagle Glacier because of its shape,” he said. The name, too, was five years old. “The head and the wings of the bird have melted away. I don’t know what we should call it now, but the eagle is dead.”

There were two poets among the crew, Aka Niviana, who is Greenlandic, and Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, from the low-lying Marshall Islands, in the Pacific, where “king tides” recently washed through living rooms and unearthed graveyards. A small lens of fresh water has supported life on the Marshall Islands’ atolls for millennia, but, as salt water intrudes, breadfruit trees and banana palms wilt and die. As the Greenlandic ice we were gazing at continues to melt, the water will drown Jetnil-Kijiner’s homeland. About a third of the carbon responsible for these changes has come from the United States.

A few days after the boat trip, the two poets and I accompanied the scientists to another fjord, where they needed to change the memory card on a camera that tracks the retreat of the ice sheet. As we took off for the flight home over the snout of a giant glacier, an eight-story chunk calved off the face and crashed into the ocean. I’d never seen anything quite like it for sheer power—the waves rose twenty feet as it plunged into the dark water. You could imagine the same waves washing through the Marshalls. You could almost sense the ice elevating the ocean by a sliver—along the seafront in Mumbai, which already floods on a stormy day, and at the Battery in Manhattan, where the seawall rises just a few feet above the water.

When I say the world has begun to shrink, this is what I mean. Until now, human beings have been spreading, from our beginnings in Africa, out across the globe—slowly at first, and then much faster. But a period of contraction is setting in as we lose parts of the habitable earth. Sometimes our retreat will be hasty and violent; the effort to evacuate the blazing California towns along narrow roads was so chaotic that many people died in their cars. But most of the pullback will be slower, starting along the world’s coastlines. Each year, another twenty-four thousand people abandon Vietnam’s sublimely fertile Mekong Delta as crop fields are polluted with salt. As sea ice melts along the Alaskan coast, there is nothing to protect towns, cities, and native villages from the waves. In Mexico Beach, Florida, which was all but eradicated by Hurricane Michael, a resident told the Washington Post, “The older people can’t rebuild; it’s too late in their lives. Who is going to be left? Who is going to care?”

In one week at the end of last year, I read accounts from Louisiana, where government officials were finalizing a plan to relocate thousands of people threatened by the rising Gulf (“Not everybody is going to live where they are now and continue their way of life, and that is a terrible, and emotional, reality to face,” one state official said); from Hawaii, where, according to a new study, thirty-eight miles of coastal roads will become impassable in the next few decades; and from Jakarta, a city with a population of ten million, where a rising Java Sea had flooded the streets. In the first days of 2018, a nor’easter flooded downtown Boston; dumpsters and cars floated through the financial district. “If anyone wants to question global warming, just see where the flood zones are,” Marty Walsh, the mayor of Boston, told reporters. “Some of those zones did not flood thirty years ago.”

According to a study from the United Kingdom’s National Oceanography Centre last summer, the damage caused by rising sea levels will cost the world as much as fourteen trillion dollars a year by 2100, if the U.N. targets aren’t met. “Like it or not, we will retreat from most of the world’s non-urban shorelines in the not very distant future,” Orrin Pilkey, an expert on sea levels at Duke University, wrote in his book “Retreat from a Rising Sea.” “We can plan now and retreat in a strategic and calculated fashion, or we can worry about it later and retreat in tactical disarray in response to devastating storms. In other words, we can walk away methodically, or we can flee in panic.”

But it’s not clear where to go. As with the rising seas, rising temperatures have begun to narrow the margins of our inhabitation, this time in the hot continental interiors. Nine of the ten deadliest heat waves in human history have occurred since 2000. In India, the rise in temperature since 1960 (about one degree Fahrenheit) has increased the chance of mass heat-related deaths by a hundred and fifty per cent. The summer of 2018 was the hottest ever measured in certain areas. For a couple of days in June, temperatures in cities in Pakistan and Iran peaked at slightly above a hundred and twenty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, the highest reliably recorded temperatures ever measured. The same heat wave, nearer the shore of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, combined triple-digit temperatures with soaring humidity levels to produce a heat index of more than a hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit. June 26th was the warmest night in history, with the mercury in one Omani city remaining above a hundred and nine degrees Fahrenheit until morning. In July, a heat wave in Montreal killed more than seventy people, and Death Valley, which often sets American records, registered the hottest month ever seen on our planet. Africa recorded its highest temperature in June, the Korean Peninsula in July, and Europe in August. The Times reported that, in Algeria, employees at a petroleum plant walked off the job as the temperature neared a hundred and twenty-four degrees. “We couldn’t keep up,” one worker told the reporter. “It was impossible to do the work.”

This was no illusion; some of the world is becoming too hot for humans.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, increased heat and humidity have reduced the amount of work people can do outdoors by ten per cent, a figure that is predicted to double by 2050. About a decade ago, Australian and American researchers, setting out to determine the highest survivable so-called “wet-bulb” temperature, concluded that when temperatures passed thirty-five degrees Celsius (ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit) and the humidity was higher than ninety per cent, even in “well-ventilated shaded conditions,” sweating slows down, and humans can survive only “for a few hours, the exact length of time being determined by individual physiology.”

“Right now, they think they have a mouse.”

As the planet warms, a crescent-shaped area encompassing parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the North China Plain, where about 1.5 billion people (a fifth of humanity) live, is at high risk of such temperatures in the next half century. Across this belt, extreme heat waves that currently happen once every generation could, by the end of the century, become “annual events with temperatures close to the threshold for several weeks each year, which could lead to famine and mass migration.” By 2070, tropical regions that now get one day of truly oppressive humid heat a year can expect between a hundred and two hundred and fifty days, if the current levels of greenhouse-gas emissions continue. According to Radley Horton, a climate scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, most people would “run into terrible problems” before then. The effects, he added, will be “transformative for all areas of human endeavor—economy, agriculture, military, recreation.”

Humans share the planet with many other creatures, of course. We have already managed to kill off sixty per cent of the world’s wildlife since 1970 by destroying their habitats, and now higher temperatures are starting to take their toll. A new study found that peak-dwelling birds were going extinct; as temperatures climb, the birds can no longer find relief on higher terrain. Coral reefs, rich in biodiversity, may soon be a tenth of their current size.

As some people flee humidity and rising sea levels, others will be forced to relocate in order to find enough water to survive. In late 2017, a study led by Manoj Joshi, of the University of East Anglia, found that, by 2050, if temperatures rise by two degrees a quarter of the earth will experience serious drought and desertification. The early signs are clear: São Paulo came within days of running out of water last year, as did Cape Town this spring. In the fall, a record drought in Germany lowered the level of the Elbe to below twenty inches and reduced the corn harvest by forty per cent. The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research concluded in a recent study that, as the number of days that reach eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit or higher increases, corn and soybean yields across the U.S. grain belt could fall by between twenty-two and forty-nine per cent. We’ve already overpumped the aquifers that lie beneath most of the world’s breadbaskets; without the means to irrigate, we may encounter a repeat of the nineteen-thirties, when droughts and deep plowing led to the Dust Bowl—this time with no way of fixing the problem. Back then, the Okies fled to California, but California is no longer a green oasis. A hundred million trees died in the record drought that gripped the Golden State for much of this decade. The dead limbs helped spread the waves of fire, as scientists earlier this year warned that they could.

Thirty years ago, some believed that warmer temperatures would expand the field of play, turning the Arctic into the new Midwest. As Rex Tillerson, then the C.E.O. of Exxon, cheerfully put it in 2012, “Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around—we’ll adapt to that.” But there is no rich topsoil in the far North; instead, the ground is underlaid with permafrost, which can be found beneath a fifth of the Northern Hemisphere. As the permafrost melts, it releases more carbon into the atmosphere. The thawing layer cracks roads, tilts houses, and uproots trees to create what scientists call “drunken forests.” Ninety scientists who released a joint report in 2017 concluded that economic losses from a warming Arctic could approach ninety trillion dollars in the course of the century, considerably outweighing whatever savings may have resulted from shorter shipping routes as the Northwest Passage unfreezes.

Churchill, Manitoba, on the edge of the Hudson Bay, in Canada, is connected to the rest of the country by a single rail line. In the spring of 2017, record floods washed away much of the track. OmniTrax, which owns the line, tried to cancel its contract with the government, declaring what lawyers call a “force majeure,” an unforeseen event beyond its responsibility. “To fix things in this era of climate change—well, it’s fixed, but you don’t count on it being the fix forever,” an engineer for the company explained at a media briefing in July. This summer, the Canadian government reopened the rail at a cost of a hundred and seventeen million dollars—about a hundred and ninety thousand dollars per Churchill resident. There is no reason to think the fix will last, and every reason to believe that our world will keep contracting.

All this has played out more or less as scientists warned, albeit faster. What has defied expectations is the slowness of the response. The climatologist James Hansen testified before Congress about the dangers of human-caused climate change thirty years ago. Since then, carbon emissions have increased with each year except 2009 (the height of the global recession) and the newest data show that 2018 will set another record. Simple inertia and the human tendency to prioritize short-term gains have played a role, but the fossil-fuel industry’s contribution has been by far the most damaging. Alex Steffen, an environmental writer, coined the term “predatory delay” to describe “the blocking or slowing of needed change, in order to make money off unsustainable, unjust systems in the meantime.” The behavior of the oil companies, which have pulled off perhaps the most consequential deception in mankind’s history, is a prime example.

As journalists at InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times have revealed since 2015, Exxon, the world’s largest oil company, understood that its product was contributing to climate change a decade before Hansen testified.

In July, 1977, James F. Black, one of Exxon’s senior scientists, addressed many of the company’s top leaders in New York, explaining the earliest research on the greenhouse effect. “There is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon-dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” he said, according to a written version of the speech which was later recorded, and which was obtained by InsideClimate News. In 1978, speaking to the company’s executives, Black estimated that a doubling of the carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by between two and three degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as ten degrees Celsius (eighteen degrees Fahrenheit) at the poles.

Exxon spent millions of dollars researching the problem. It outfitted an oil tanker, the Esso Atlantic, with CO₂ detectors to measure how fast the oceans could absorb excess carbon, and hired mathematicians to build sophisticated climate models. By 1982, they had concluded that even the company’s earlier estimates were probably too low. In a private corporate primer, they wrote that heading off global warming and “potentially catastrophic events” would “require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.”

An investigation by the L.A. Times revealed that Exxon executives took these warnings seriously. Ken Croasdale, a senior researcher for the company’s Canadian subsidiary, led a team that investigated the positive and negative effects of warming on Exxon’s Arctic operations. In 1991, he found that greenhouse gases were rising due to the burning of fossil fuels. “Nobody disputes this fact,” he said. The following year, he wrote that “global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs” in the Beaufort Sea.

Drilling season in the Arctic, he correctly predicted, would increase from two months to as many as five months. At the same time, he said, the rise in the sea level could threaten onshore infrastructure and create bigger waves that would damage offshore drilling structures. Thawing permafrost could make the earth buckle and slide under buildings and pipelines. As a result of these findings, Exxon and other major oil companies began laying plans to move into the Arctic, and started to build their new drilling platforms with higher decks, to compensate for the anticipated rises in sea level.

The implications of the exposés were startling. Not only did Exxon and other companies know that scientists like Hansen were right; they used his NASA climate models to figure out how low their drilling costs in the Arctic would eventually fall. Had Exxon and its peers passed on what they knew to the public, geological history would look very different today. The problem of climate change would not be solved, but the crisis would, most likely, now be receding. In 1989, an international ban on chlorine-containing man-made chemicals that had been eroding the earth’s ozone layer went into effect. Last month, researchers reported that the ozone layer was on track to fully heal by 2060. But that was a relatively easy fight, because the chemicals in question were not central to the world’s economy, and the manufacturers had readily available substitutes to sell. In the case of global warming, the culprit is fossil fuel, the most lucrative commodity on earth, and so the companies responsible took a different tack.

A document uncovered by the L.A. Times showed that, a month after Hansen’s testimony, in 1988, an unnamed Exxon “public affairs manager” issued an internal memo recommending that the company “emphasize the uncertainty” in the scientific data about climate change. Within a few years, Exxon, Chevron, Shell, Amoco, and others had joined the Global Climate Coalition, “to coordinate business participation in the international policy debate” on global warming. The G.C.C. coördinated with the National Coal Association and the American Petroleum Institute on a campaign, via letters and telephone calls, to prevent a tax on fossil fuels, and produced a video in which the agency insisted that more carbon dioxide would “end world hunger” by promoting plant growth. With such efforts, it ginned up opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, the first global initiative to address climate change.

In October, 1997, two months before the Kyoto meeting, Lee Raymond, Exxon’s president and C.E.O., who had overseen the science department that in the nineteen-eighties produced the findings about climate change, gave a speech in Beijing to the World Petroleum Congress, in which he maintained that the earth was actually cooling. The idea that cutting fossil-fuel emissions could have an effect on the climate, he said, defied common sense. “It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be affected whether policies are enacted now, or twenty years from now,” he went on. Exxon’s own scientists had already shown each of these premises to be wrong.

On a December morning in 1997 at the Kyoto Convention Center, after a long night of negotiation, the developed nations reached a tentative accord on climate change. Exhausted delegates lay slumped on couches in the corridor, or on the floor in their suits, but most of them were grinning. Imperfect and limited though the agreement was, it seemed that momentum had gathered behind fighting climate change. But as I watched the delegates cheering and clapping, an American lobbyist, who had been coördinating much of the opposition to the accord, turned to me and said, “I can’t wait to get back to Washington, where we’ve got this under control.”

“I hope this visit from your king has brightened your outlook on things.”

He was right. On January 29, 2001, nine days after George W. Bush was inaugurated, Lee Raymond visited his old friend Vice-President Dick Cheney, who had just stepped down as the C.E.O. of the oil-drilling giant Halliburton. Cheney helped persuade Bush to abandon his campaign promise to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Within the year, Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant for Bush, had produced an internal memo that made a doctrine of the strategy that the G.C.C. had hit on a decade earlier. “Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community,” Luntz wrote in the memo, which was obtained by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based organization. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”

The strategy of muddling the public’s impression of climate science has proved to be highly effective. In 2017, polls found that almost ninety per cent of Americans did not know that there was a scientific consensus on global warming. Raymond retired in 2006, after the company posted the biggest corporate profits in history, and his final annual salary was four hundred million dollars. His successor, Rex Tillerson, signed a five-hundred-billion-dollar deal to explore for oil in the rapidly thawing Russian Arctic, and in 2012 was awarded the Russian Order of Friendship. In 2016, Tillerson, at his last shareholder meeting before he briefly joined the Trump Administration as Secretary of State, said, “The world is going to have to continue using fossil fuels, whether they like it or not.”

It’s by no means clear whether Exxon’s deception and obfuscation are illegal. The company has long maintained that it “has tracked the scientific consensus on climate change, and its research on the issue has been published in publicly available peer-reviewed journals.” The First Amendment preserves one’s right to lie, although, in October, New York State Attorney General Barbara D. Underwood filed suit against Exxon for lying to investors, which is a crime. What is certain is that the industry’s campaign cost us the efforts of the human generation that might have made the crucial difference in the climate fight.
 

Exxon’s behavior is shocking, but not entirely surprising. Philip Morris lied about the effects of cigarette smoking before the government stood up to Big Tobacco. The mystery that historians will have to unravel is what went so wrong in our governance and our culture that we have done, essentially, nothing to stand up to the fossil-fuel industry.

There are undoubtedly myriad intellectual, psychological, and political sources for our inaction, but I cannot help thinking that the influence of Ayn Rand, the Russian émigré novelist, may have played a role. Rand’s disquisitions on the “virtue of selfishness” and unbridled capitalism are admired by many American politicians and economists—Paul Ryan, Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, Andrew Puzder, and Donald Trump, among them. Trump, who has called “The Fountainhead” his favorite book, said that the novel “relates to business and beauty and life and inner emotions. That book relates to . . . everything.” Long after Rand’s death, in 1982, the libertarian gospel of the novel continues to sway our politics: Government is bad. Solidarity is a trap. Taxes are theft. The Koch brothers, whose enormous fortune derives in large part from the mining and refining of oil and gas, have peddled a similar message, broadening the efforts that Exxon-funded groups like the Global Climate Coalition spearheaded in the late nineteen-eighties.

Fossil-fuel companies and electric utilities, often led by Koch-linked groups, have put up fierce resistance to change. In Kansas, Koch allies helped turn mandated targets for renewable energy into voluntary commitments. In Wisconsin, Scott Walker’s administration prohibited state land officials from talking about climate change. In North Carolina, the state legislature, in conjunction with real-estate interests, effectively banned policymakers from using scientific estimates of sea-level rise in the coastal-planning process.

Earlier this year, Americans for Prosperity, the most important Koch front group, waged a campaign against new bus routes and light-rail service in Tennessee, invoking human liberty. “If someone has the freedom to go where they want, do what they want, they’re not going to choose public transit,” a spokeswoman for the group explained. In Florida, an anti-renewable-subsidy ballot measure invoked the “Rights of Electricity Consumers Regarding Solar Energy Choice.”

Such efforts help explain why, in 2017, the growth of American residential solar installations came to a halt even before March, 2018, when President Trump imposed a thirty-per-cent tariff on solar panels, and why the number of solar jobs fell in the U.S. for the first time since the industry’s great expansion began, a decade earlier. In February, at the Department of Energy, Rick Perry—who once skipped his own arraignment on two felony charges, which were eventually dismissed, in order to attend a Koch brothers event—issued a new projection in which he announced that the U.S. would go on emitting carbon at current levels through 2050; this means that our nation would use up all the planet’s remaining carbon budget if we plan on meeting the 1.5-degree target. Skepticism about the scientific consensus, Perry told the media in 2017, is a sign of a “wise, intellectually engaged person.”

Of all the environmental reversals made by the Trump Administration, the most devastating was its decision, last year, to withdraw from the Paris accords, making the U.S., the largest single historical source of carbon, the only nation not engaged in international efforts to control it. As the Washington Post reported, the withdrawal was the result of a collaborative venture. Among the anti-government ideologues and fossil-fuel lobbyists responsible was Myron Ebell, who was at Trump’s side in the Rose Garden during the withdrawal announcement, and who, at Frontiers of Freedom, had helped run a “complex influence campaign” in support of the tobacco industry. Ebell is a director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which was founded in 1984 to advance “the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty,” and which funds the Cooler Heads Coalition, “an informal and ad-hoc group focused on dispelling the myths of global warming,” of which Ebell is the chairman. Also instrumental were the Heartland Institute and the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity. After Trump’s election, these groups sent a letter reminding him of his campaign pledge to pull America out. The C.E.I. ran a TV spot: “Mr. President, don’t listen to the swamp. Keep your promise.” And, despite the objections of most of his advisers, he did. The coalition had used its power to slow us down precisely at the moment when we needed to speed up. As a result, the particular politics of one country for one half-century will have changed the geological history of the earth.
 

We are on a path to self-destruction, and yet there is nothing inevitable about our fate. Solar panels and wind turbines are now among the least expensive ways to produce energy. Storage batteries are cheaper and more efficient than ever. We could move quickly if we chose to, but we’d need to opt for solidarity and coördination on a global scale. The chances of that look slim. In Russia, the second-largest petrostate after the U.S., Vladimir Putin believes that “climate change could be tied to some global cycles on Earth or even of planetary significance.” Saudi Arabia, the third-largest petrostate, tried to water down the recent I.P.C.C. report. Jair Bolsonaro, the newly elected President of Brazil, has vowed to institute policies that would dramatically accelerate the deforestation of the Amazon, the world’s largest rain forest. Meanwhile, Exxon recently announced a plan to spend a million dollars—about a hundredth of what the company spends each month in search of new oil and gas—to back the fight for a carbon tax of forty dollars a ton. At a press conference, some of the I.P.C.C.’s authors laughed out loud at the idea that such a tax would, this late in the game, have sufficient impact.

The possibility of swift change lies in people coming together in movements large enough to shift the Zeitgeist. In recent years, despairing at the slow progress, I’ve been one of many to protest pipelines and to call attention to Big Oil’s deceptions. The movement is growing. Since 2015, when four hundred thousand people marched in the streets of New York before the Paris climate talks, activists—often led by indigenous groups and communities living on the front lines of climate change—have blocked pipelines, forced the cancellation of new coal mines, helped keep the major oil companies out of the American Arctic, and persuaded dozens of cities to commit to one-hundred-per-cent renewable energy.

Each of these efforts has played out in the shadow of the industry’s unflagging campaign to maximize profits and prevent change. Voters in Washington State were initially supportive of a measure on last month’s ballot which would have imposed the nation’s first carbon tax—a modest fee that won support from such figures as Bill Gates. But the major oil companies spent record sums to defeat it. In Colorado, a similarly modest referendum that would have forced frackers to move their rigs away from houses and schools went down after the oil industry outspent citizen groups forty to one. This fall, California’s legislators committed to using only renewable energy by 2045, which was a great victory in the world’s fifth-largest economy. But the governor refused to stop signing new permits for oil wells, even in the middle of the state’s largest cities, where asthma rates are high.

New kinds of activism keep springing up. In Sweden this fall, a one-person school boycott by a fifteen-year-old girl named Greta Thunberg helped galvanize attention across Scandinavia. At the end of October, a new British group, Extinction Rebellion—its name both a reflection of the dire science and a potentially feisty response—announced plans for a campaign of civil disobedience. Last week, fifty-one young people were arrested in Nancy Pelosi’s office for staging a sit-in, demanding that the Democrats embrace a “Green New Deal” that would address the global climate crisis with policies to create jobs in renewable energy. They may have picked a winning issue: several polls have shown that even Republicans favor more government support for solar panels. This battle is epic and undecided. If we miss the two-degree target, we will fight to prevent a rise of three degrees, and then four. It’s a long escalator down to Hell.

“Oh, yes. Definitely a forgery. Hope it didn’t cost you much.”

Last June, I went to Cape Canaveral to watch Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 rocket lift off. When the moment came, it was as I’d always imagined: the clouds of steam venting in the minutes before launch, the immensely bright column of flame erupting. With remarkable slowness, the rocket began to rise, the grip of gravity yielding to the force of its engines. It is the most awesome technological spectacle human beings have produced.

Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson are among the billionaires who have spent some of their fortunes on space travel—a last-ditch effort to expand the human zone of habitability. In November, 2016, Stephen Hawking gave humanity a deadline of a thousand years to leave Earth. Six months later, he revised the timetable to a century. In June, 2017, he told an audience that “spreading out may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves.” He continued, “Earth is under threat from so many areas that it is difficult for me to be positive.”

But escaping the wreckage is, almost certainly, a fantasy. Even if astronauts did cross the thirty-four million miles to Mars, they’d need to go underground to survive there. To what end? The multimillion-dollar attempts at building a “biosphere” in the Southwestern desert in 1991 ended in abject failure. Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of a trilogy of novels about the colonization of Mars, recently called such projects a “moral hazard.” “People think if we fuck up here on Earth we can always go to Mars or the stars,” he said. “It’s pernicious.”

The dream of interplanetary colonization also distracts us from acknowledging the unbearable beauty of the planet we already inhabit. The day before the launch, I went on a tour of the vast grounds of the Kennedy Space Center with NASA’s public-affairs officer, Greg Harland, and the biologist Don Dankert. I’d been warned beforehand by other NASA officials not to broach the topic of global warming; in any event, NASA’s predicament became obvious as soon as we climbed up on a dune overlooking Launch Complex 39, from which the Apollo missions left for the moon, and where any future Mars mission would likely begin. The launchpad is a quarter of a mile from the ocean—a perfect location, in the sense that, if something goes wrong, the rockets will fall into the sea, but not so perfect, since that sea is now rising. NASA started worrying about this sometime after the turn of the century, and formed a Dune Vulnerability Team.

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy, even at a distance of a couple of hundred miles, churned up waves strong enough to break through the barrier of dunes along the Atlantic shoreline of the Space Center and very nearly swamped the launch complexes. Dankert had millions of cubic yards of sand excavated from a nearby Air Force base, and saw to it that a hundred and eighty thousand native shrubs were planted to hold the sand in place. So far, the new dunes have yielded little ground to storms and hurricanes. But what impressed me more than the dunes was the men’s deep appreciation of their landscape. “Kennedy Space Center shares real estate with the Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge,” Harland said. “We use less than ten per cent for our industrial purposes.”

“When you look at the beach, it’s like eighteen-seventies Florida—the longest undisturbed stretch on the Atlantic Coast,” Dankert said. “We launch people into space from the middle of a wildlife refuge. That’s amazing.”
The two men talked for a long time about their favorite local species—the brown pelicans that were skimming the ocean, the Florida scrub jays. While rebuilding the dunes, they carefully bucket-trapped and relocated dozens of gopher tortoises. Before I left, they drove me half an hour across the swamp to a pond near the Space Center’s headquarters building, just to show me some alligators. Menacing snouts were visible beneath the water, but I was more interested in the sign that had been posted at each corner of the pond explaining that the alligators were native species, not pets. “Putting any food in the water for any reason will cause them to become accustomed to people and possibly dangerous,” it went on, adding that, if that should happen, “they must be removed and destroyed.”

Something about the sign moved me tremendously. It would have been easy enough to poison the pond, just as it would have been easy enough to bulldoze the dunes without a thought for the tortoises. But NASA hadn’t done so, because of a long series of laws that draw on an emerging understanding of who we are. In 1867, John Muir, one of the first Western environmentalists, walked from Louisville, Kentucky, to Florida, a trip that inspired his first heretical thoughts about the meaning of being human. “The world, we are told, was made especially for man—a presumption not supported by all the facts,” Muir wrote in his diary. “A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.” Muir’s proof that this self-centeredness was misguided was the alligator, which he could hear roaring in the Florida swamp as he camped nearby, and which clearly caused man mostly trouble. But these animals were wonderful nonetheless, Muir decided—remarkable creatures perfectly adapted to their landscape. “I have better thoughts of those alligators now that I’ve seen them at home,” he wrote. In his diary, he addressed the creatures directly: “Honorable representatives of the great saurian of an older creation, may you long enjoy your lilies and rushes, and be blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of dainty.”

That evening, Harland and Dankert drew a crude map to help me find the beach, north of Patrick Air Force Base and south of the spot where, in 1965, Barbara Eden emerged from her bottle to greet her astronaut at the start of the TV series “I Dream of Jeannie.” There, they said, I could wait out the hours until the pre-dawn rocket launch and perhaps spot a loggerhead sea turtle coming ashore to lay her eggs. And so I sat on the sand. The beach was deserted, and under a near-full moon I watched as a turtle trundled from the sea and lumbered deliberately to a spot near the dune, where she used her powerful legs to excavate a pit. She spent an hour laying eggs, and even from thirty yards away you could hear her heavy breathing in between the whispers of the waves. And then, having covered her clutch, she tracked back to the ocean, in the fashion of others like her for the past hundred and twenty million years.

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.

By Dexter Filkins

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.

The group was small—a handful of scientists, scattered across the country—and politically diverse. (Max described himself as “a John McCain Republican.”) Its members sometimes worked with law enforcement or for private clients, but mostly they acted as self-appointed guardians of the Internet, trying to thwart hackers and to keep the system clean of malware—software that hackers use to control a computer remotely, or to extract data. “People think the Internet runs on its own,” Max told me. “It doesn’t. We do this to keep the Internet safe.” The hack of the D.N.C. seemed like a pernicious attack on the integrity of the Web, as well as on the American political system. The scientists decided to investigate whether any Republicans had been hacked, too. “We were trying to protect them,” Max said.

Max’s group began combing the Domain Name System, a worldwide network that acts as a sort of phone book for the Internet, translating easy-to-remember domain names into I.P. addresses, the strings of numbers that computers use to identify one another. Whenever someone goes online—to send an e-mail, to visit a Web site—her device contacts the Domain Name System to locate the computer that it is trying to connect with. Each query, known as a D.N.S. lookup, can be logged, leaving records in a constellation of servers that extends through private companies, public institutions, and universities. Max and his group are part of a community that has unusual access to these records, which are especially useful to cybersecurity experts who work to protect clients from attacks.

Max and the other computer scientists asked me to withhold their names, out of concern for their privacy and their security. I met with Max and his lawyer repeatedly, and interviewed other prominent computer experts. (Among them were Jean Camp, of Indiana University; Steven Bellovin, of Columbia University; Daniel Kahn Gillmor, of the A.C.L.U.; Richard Clayton, of the University of Cambridge; Matt Blaze, of the University of Pennsylvania; and Paul Vixie, of Farsight Security.) Several of them independently reviewed the records that Max’s group had discovered and confirmed that they would be difficult to fake. A senior aide on Capitol Hill, who works in national security, said that Max’s research is widely respected among experts in computer science and cybersecurity.

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. “We were watching this happen in real time—it was like watching an airplane fly by,” Max said. “And we thought, Why the hell is a Russian bank communicating with a server that belongs to the Trump Organization, and at such a rate?”

Only one other entity seemed to be reaching out to the Trump Organization’s domain with any frequency: Spectrum Health, of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Spectrum Health is closely linked to the DeVos family; Richard DeVos, Jr., is the chairman of the board, and one of its hospitals is named after his mother. His wife, Betsy DeVos, was appointed Secretary of Education by Donald Trump. Her brother, Erik Prince, is a Trump associate who has attracted the scrutiny of Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trump’s ties to Russia. Mueller has been looking into Prince’s meeting, following the election, with a Russian official in the Seychelles, at which he reportedly discussed setting up a back channel between Trump and the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. (Prince maintains that the meeting was “incidental.”) In the summer of 2016, Max and the others weren’t aware of any of this. “We didn’t know who DeVos was,” Max said.

The D.N.S. records raised vexing questions. Why was the Trump Organization’s domain, set up to send mass-marketing e-mails, conducting such meagre activity? And why were computers at Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health trying to reach a server that didn’t seem to be doing anything? After analyzing the data, Max said, “We decided this was a covert communication channel.”

The Trump Organization, Alfa Bank, and Spectrum Health have repeatedly denied any contact. But the question of whether Max’s conclusion was correct remains enormously consequential. Was this evidence of an illicit connection between Russia and the Trump campaign? Or was it merely a coincidence, cyber trash, that fed suspicions in a dark time?

In August, 2016, Max decided to reveal the data that he and his colleagues had assembled. “If the covert communications were real, this potential threat to our country needed to be known before the election,” he said. After some discussion, he and his lawyer decided to hand over the findings to Eric Lichtblau, of the Times. Lichtblau met with Max, and began to look at the data.

Lichtblau had done breakthrough reporting on National Security Agency surveillance, and he knew that Max’s findings would require sophisticated analysis. D.N.S. lookups are metadata—records that indicate computer interactions but don’t necessarily demonstrate human communication. Lichtblau shared the data with three leading computer scientists, and, like Max, they were struck by the unusual traffic on the server. As Lichtblau talked to experts, he became increasingly convinced that the data suggested a substantive connection. “Not only is there clearly something there but there’s clearly something that someone has gone to great lengths to conceal,” he told me. Jean Camp, of Indiana University, had also vetted some of the data. “These people who should not be communicating are clearly communicating,” she said. In order to encourage discussion among analysts, Camp posted a portion of the raw data on her Web site.

As Lichtblau wrote a draft of an article for the Times, Max’s lawyer contacted the F.B.I. to alert agents that a story about Trump would be running in a national publication, and to pass along the data. A few days later, an F.B.I. official called Lichtblau and asked him to come to the Bureau’s headquarters, in Washington, D.C.

At the meeting, in late September, 2016, a roomful of officials told Lichtblau that they were looking into potential Russian interference in the election. According to a source who was briefed on the investigation, the Bureau had intelligence from informants suggesting a possible connection between the Trump Organization and Russian banks, but no data. The information from Max’s group could be a significant advance. “The F.B.I. was looking for people in the United States who were helping Russia to influence the election,” the source said. “It was very important to the Bureau. It was urgent.”

The F.B.I. officials asked Lichtblau to delay publishing his story, saying that releasing the news could jeopardize their investigation. As the story sat, Dean Baquet, the Times’ executive editor, decided that it would not suffice to report the existence of computer contacts without knowing their purpose.

Lichtblau disagreed, arguing that his story contained important news: that the F.B.I. had opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian contacts with Trump’s aides. “It was a really tense debate,” Baquet told me. “If I were the reporter, I would have wanted to run it, too. It felt like there was something there.” But, with the election looming, Baquet thought that he could not publish the story without being more confident in its conclusions.

Over time, the F.B.I.’s interest in the possibility of an Alfa Bank connection seemed to wane. An agency official told Lichtblau that there could be an innocuous explanation for the computer traffic. Then, on October 30th, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid wrote a letter to James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., charging that the Bureau was withholding information about “close ties and coordination” between the Trump campaign and Russia. “We had a window,” Lichtblau said. His story about Alfa Bank ran the next day. But it bore only a modest resemblance to what he had filed. The headline— “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia”—seemed to exonerate the Trump campaign. And, though the article mentioned the server, it omitted any reference to the computer scientists who had told Lichtblau that the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank might have been communicating. “We were saying that the investigation was basically over—and it was just beginning,” Lichtblau told me.

That same day, Slate ran a story, by Franklin Foer, that made a detailed case for the possibility of a covert link between Alfa Bank and Trump. Foer’s report was based largely on information from a colleague of Max’s who called himself Tea Leaves. Foer quoted several outside experts; most said that there appeared to be no other plausible explanation for the data.

One remarkable aspect of Foer’s story 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. (Technically, its “A record,” which translates the domain name to an I.P. address, was deleted. If the D.N.S. is a phone book, the domain name was effectively decoupled from its number.) For four days, the servers at Alfa Bank kept trying to look up the Trump domain. Then, ten minutes after the last attempt, one of them looked up another domain, which had been configured to lead.

Max’s group was surprised. The Trump domain had been shut down after the Times contacted Alfa Bank’s representatives—but before the newspaper contacted Trump. “That shows a human interaction,” Max concluded. “Certain actions leave fingerprints.” He reasoned that someone representing Alfa Bank had alerted the Trump Organization, which shut down the domain, set up another one, and then informed Alfa Bank of the new address.

A week after the Times story appeared, Trump won the election. On Inauguration Day, Liz Spayd, the Times’ ombudsman, published a column criticizing the paper’s handling of stories related to Trump and Russia, including the Alfa Bank connection. “The Times was too timid in its decisions not to publish the material it had,” she wrote. Spayd’s article did not sit well with Baquet. “It was a bad column,” he told the Washington Post. Spayd argued that Slate had acted correctly by publishing a more aggressive story, which Baquet dismissed as a “fairly ridiculous conclusion.” That June, Spayd’s job was eliminated, as the paper’s publisher said that the position of ombudsman had become outdated in the digital age. When I talked to Baquet recently, he still felt that he had been right to resist discussing the server in greater depth, but he acknowledged that the Times had been too quick to disclaim the possibility of Trump’s connections to Russia. “The story was written too knowingly,” he said. “The headline was flawed. We didn’t know then what we know now.”

In April, 2017, Lichtblau left the Times, after fifteen years—in part, he said, because of the way that the Alfa Bank story was handled. He went to work for CNN, but resigned less than two months later, amid controversy over another story that he had worked on, about the Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci. This April, Lichtblau returned to the Times newsroom for a celebration: he had been part of a team of Times reporters that was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its work on other aspects of the Trump campaign. “It was quite a year,” he said.

Meanwhile, the 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. She declined to reveal their names. “This is what tenure is for,” she told me.

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.

He and the other Democratic senators were especially troubled that Benczkowski would not commit to recusing himself from dealing with Mueller’s investigation, even though he had worked for two of Russia’s leading oligarchs. “Why did you refuse to recuse yourself?” Senator Dianne Feinstein asked.

“I don’t know what’s in Special Prosecutor Mueller’s investigation,” Benczkowski said. “I’m a lawyer in private practice. I have no idea what he’s up to, other than what I read in the papers.”

Despite these questions, the Republican-led committee approved Benczkowski. This past July, the Senate confirmed him.

While Republicans in Congress have rejected the possibility of collusion, with some joining Trump in calling the Mueller inquiry a politically motivated “witch hunt,” a few Democrats have continued to pursue the matter. After Trump’s Inauguration, two Democratic senators who had reviewed the data assembled by Max’s group—Mark Warner and a colleague who requested anonymity—asked the F.B.I. for an assessment of any potential contacts between Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization. The material was also brought to the attention of the C.I.A., which found it substantial enough to suggest that the F.B.I. investigate. In March, 2017, a Pennsylvania news outlet called Lancaster Online reported that F.B.I. agents had visited the offices of Listrak, the company that housed the Trump server. Ross Kramer, Listrak’s C.E.O., told me, “I gave them everything they asked for.”

Around the same time, the second Democratic senator approached a former Senate staffer named Daniel Jones and asked him to give the data a closer look. Jones had served as a counterterrorism investigator for the F.B.I. and then spent ten years working for the Senate Intelligence Committee, where he led the inquiry into the use of torture under the George W. Bush Administration. Now he was running an investigations firm, the Penn Quarter Group, and a nonprofit initiative called the Democracy Integrity Project, which was intended to help keep elections free from foreign interference.

To assess the Alfa Bank data, Jones assembled a team of computer scientists, divided into two groups, one on each coast. (They also consulted with Jean Camp, who agreed to coöperate despite the possibility that Alfa Bank might take legal action.) All these experts have national reputations in the field. Some have held senior cybersecurity jobs in the Pentagon, the White House, and the intelligence services, as well as in leading American technology companies. In order to encourage an unbiased outcome, Jones never introduced the East Coast group to the West Coast group.

I met several times with the two members of the East Coast group and spoke with them repeatedly. They used pseudonyms, Paul and Leto, in part because they had been alarmed by encounters with Russia while they were working at high levels of government. Leto said that, in 2016, as he was investigating cyber intrusions that seemed to originate in Russia, he became convinced that he was being followed. Both he and Paul believed that their phones had been hacked. These incursions coincided with a period of intense Russian activity in the U.S., including the hacking of the D.N.C., a pro-Trump social-media blitz, and the arrival of Maria Butina, who is accused of being a Russian agent sent to ingratiate herself with American conservative leaders. (Butina has denied the accusations.)

As Paul and Leto began working, they needed to verify that Max’s data presented an accurate picture of the traffic. After the Slate story appeared, skeptics pointed out that no one has a comprehensive view of the Domain Name System. They speculated that other entities, besides Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health, had looked up the Trump domain, and that Max had failed to see them. The D.N.S. company Dyn told a reporter that it had seen lookups from other computers around the world. But Dyn turned out to have registered only two additional lookups, both from the same address in the Netherlands.

Max and his colleagues maintain that they are able to see nearly all the D.N.S. lookups on a given domain; the senior Capitol Hill aide I spoke to affirmed that Max’s group is widely understood to have this capability. Paul Vixie, one of the original architects of the D.N.S. network, examined the data and told me, “If this is a forgery, it’s better than any forgery I’ve seen.” Jones’s team also ran analyses and real-time tests to check Max’s access to D.N.S. records. “It’s completely implausible that he could have fooled us,” Paul said.

Max had provided the Jones team with thirty-seven million D.N.S. records, enough to fill thousands of screens with time stamps and I.P. addresses—long strings of numbers and letters in green type. Over the course of several months, Paul and Leto examined the data for patterns and anomalies. “We stared at a lot of green screens,” Paul said. They regarded their inquiry as a statistical enterprise, capturing each Alfa Bank D.N.S. query from the ocean of data that they had been given and plotting it over a four-month period. Both said that they began their work as skeptics. “I started from an assumption that this is a bunch of nonsense,” Leto told me.

Much of the information that was publicly available might well have supported that assumption. Foer’s article in Slate had prompted online discussions, in which commentators offered explanations ranging from the benign to the sinister. The timing of the lookups, which came in the summer just before the election, invited speculation. Foer claimed that the biggest flurries of traffic coincided with major campaign events, including the party conventions. Paul and Leto were dubious. If anything, the 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. This became a catchall answer for anyone who couldn’t explain what had happened. “Either this is something innocuous, like spam,” Rachel Cohen, a press secretary for Senator Warner, told me, “or it’s completely nefarious.”

Alfa Bank had received Trump marketing e-mails in the past. But Cendyn had told CNN that it stopped sending e-mails for the Trump Organization in March, 2016, before the peculiar activity began; Trump had transferred his online marketing to another company, called Serenata. Jones’s team investigated, and found additional evidence that the server wasn’t sending marketing e-mails at the time. One indicator was the unusually limited traffic. Kramer, of Listrak, told me that a typical client sends “tens of thousands of e-mails a day” to huge numbers of recipients. If the Trump server was following that pattern, it would have generated significant D.N.S. traffic. To establish a kind of control group, Jones’s team asked Max to capture the D.N.S. logs for the Denihan Hospitality Group—a hotel chain, similar in size to Trump’s, which was using Cendyn and Listrak to send marketing e-mails. In a sample spanning August and September, 2016, a Denihan domain received more than twenty thousand D.N.S. queries, from more than a thousand I.P. addresses. In the same period, the Trump domain had twenty-five hundred lookups, nearly all of them from Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health.

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. Did someone try to make it appear, falsely, that Alfa Bank was reaching out to the Trump Organization? Jones’s team concluded that such an attack would have been unlikely to produce thousands of D.N.S. lookups, over such a long time.

“Maybe for a few days, but not four months,” Leto said. There was also a question of motive. In the spring of 2016, very few people knew that Max and his colleagues were able to monitor D.N.S. traffic so comprehensively, so any spoofers would have been impersonating Alfa Bank with little expectation of being detected. News stories investigating the links between Trump and Russia were months away. “Why would someone do that?” Steven Bellovin, of Columbia, said. “And why would they pick those organizations?”

When I saw Petr Aven at the Four Seasons, he argued that the connections with the Trump Organization had been fabricated in order to frame his company. “This is a conspiracy against us,” he told me. “It is really much bigger than the computers.” Aven did not elaborate, but Jeffrey Birnbaum, a spokesperson for Alfa Bank, supplied more detail. The bank, he said, suspected that “we are victims of classic Russian kompromat—a well-known scam in which Russian competitors pay analysts to write false reports to damage reputations.” Birnbaum described the press inquiries into the matter as an extended affliction. “This has been a terrible ordeal for Alfa Bank, like living through a Kafka novel,” he said. (Max rejected the idea that his group had fabricated data. “If we were going to lie, then we would have made up a much better story than this!” he said.)

Because Alfa Bank did not retain its D.N.S. logs (many large companies don’t), its assessments of what produced the lookups in early 2016 are necessarily speculative. “We are as mystified as anybody about these false allegations,” Birnbaum told me this September. In a series of exchanges over three weeks, he offered a range of possibilities. He suggested that the data had been faked, but also that they had been stolen from the bank’s logs. He attributed the traffic to kompromat, but also expounded a scenario in which it had been caused by a technical glitch: Trump e-mails “hidden” in the system were intermittently processed by the bank’s security software, an application called Trend Micro Deep Discovery Inspector. In this explanation, Trump marketing e-mails from before March, 2016, had made it through the spam filter and been stored in a permanent archive, where the bank backs up all its e-mail. Periodically, the bank re-scanned that archive, as updates to the security software provided new information about which senders might be unsafe. During scans, the system performed D.N.S. lookups for every domain name contained in every e-mail. In the course of several months, the bank said, this could account for the traffic.

The experts I spoke to confirmed that this was a technically plausible, if highly inefficient, way to configure security software. But the explanation raised questions of its own. Alfa Bank said that its scans ran for two days after each update. But Max’s data don’t show a consistent pattern of two-day spikes. Another concern lay in the chronology. The bank had received e-mails from the Trump domain in late 2015 and early 2016, which should have triggered lookups. But, according to the data, the lookups didn’t begin until May, 2016. In response to a question about this discrepancy, Birnbaum said that the Trend Micro software had not been “fully integrated” until March—but that wouldn’t account for the time between March and May.

A third problem was that, if Alfa Bank wasn’t receiving new e-mails from the Trump Organization after March, 2016, then the number of Trump e-mails in the archive—and thus the number of lookups—should have remained steady through the summer. But Max’s data showed a different pattern: no lookups in the spring, a small number in May, and then a slow increase starting in June, with spikes that lasted until the system went offline. When asked about the increase, Birnbaum offered another refinement of the explanation. The bank had previously said that the software had performed checks of old e-mails “multiple times over the six-month period.” Now he said that a security update “around August” had caused old e-mails to be re-scanned.

In any case, for an explanation of this kind to work, it would require the servers at Spectrum Health to be simultaneously experiencing the same glitch, or another one with similar effects. (Spectrum declined to answer questions about its computer systems.) Trend Micro has thousands of users, most of them businesses, but in the sample that Max and his colleagues could see, only Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health exhibited this peculiar behavior.

For some, the most baffling part of the puzzle was the way that the lookups stopped. The Trump domain vanished from the Web on the morning of Friday, September 23rd, two days after the Times presented its data to B.G.R., Alfa Bank’s lobbyists in Washington, but before it called Trump or Cendyn. In Max’s view, this was evidence of direct contact between Alfa Bank and Trump. One researcher whom Foer interviewed put it vividly: “The knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.” There is, however, at least one possibility that doesn’t involve Moscow: the lobbyists in Washington could have passed along a warning to Trump, as a courtesy. But B.G.R. denies doing this, calling the idea “ridiculous on its face.”

Whatever the reason that the Trump domain vanished, Alfa Bank’s servers continued trying to look it up: Max’s group observed fifteen failed attempts that Friday, twenty-eight on Saturday, none on Sunday, ninety on Monday, twenty on Tuesday. Spectrum Health’s machine kept trying, too, in a weeklong spasm of activity that entailed thousands of seemingly automated lookups. Spectrum never succeeded in relocating the Trump server—but Alfa did. On the night of Tuesday, September 27th, ten minutes after the bank made its last failed attempt, it looked up the domain name trump1.contact-client.com—which was, it turned out, another route to the same Trump server.

The alternative domain name does not appear to have been previously active; no one has produced an e-mail sent from it. So how did Alfa find it? The easiest method would have been by consulting a PTR record, which shows what domain names are associated with a given I.P. address. But the PTR record for the Trump address did not include the alternative name.

Birnbaum said that Alfa Bank’s researchers, investigating the traffic, found the new name in other public records and then performed a test lookup. Vixie said that such a lookup would be unusual, and questioned why the bank would feel that it was necessary: “Why did Alfa look up either name? And especially the second name?”

According to Max’s data, Alfa Bank looked up the new domain name only once. In the following months, he and his group stopped collecting data on the Trump Organization domains. After the Slate story came out, curious readers looked up the address thousands of times, and the D.N.S. traffic devolved into statistical noise. The Trump Organization now controls the original domain; in March, 2017, Cendyn told CNN that it had been “transferred back.” Records show that Cendyn handed over the domain only a few days before the CNN story ran—a year after the last e-mail was sent from it. Jones’s team believed that Cendyn had continued its relationship with the Trump Organization in 2016. “There were thousands of e-mails between Trump and Cendyn through the entire period that Alfa Bank was looking up the Trump server,” Max told me. Cendyn said that this was “regular business correspondence,” related to transferring back the domain. When I called the company’s C.E.O., Richard Deyo, to ask more broadly about the situation, he said, “This is old news—that’s just Internet traffic,” and then hung up. A spokesperson for Serenata, which took over Trump’s hotel marketing, told me that the company had nothing to say. “Don’t call again,” she said.

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.”

Paul and Leto periodically went back to Max in the course of their research, interrogating his assumptions and asking for more information. In one tranche of data that he gave them, they noticed that a third entity, in addition to Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health, had been looking up the Trump domain: Heartland Payment Systems, a payments processor based in Princeton. Of the thirty-five hundred D.N.S. queries seen for the Trump domain, Heartland made only seventy-six—but no other visible entity made more than two. Heartland had a link to Alfa Bank, but a tenuous one. It had recently been acquired by Global Payments, which, in 2009, had paid seventy-five million dollars for United Card Services, Russia’s leading credit-card-processing company; two years later, United Card Services bought Alfa Bank’s credit-card-processing unit. (A spokesperson for Global Payments said that her company had never had any relationship with the Trump Organization or with Alfa Bank, and that its U.S. and Russia operations functioned entirely independently.)

Spectrum Health has a similarly indirect business tie to Alfa Bank. Richard DeVos’ father co-founded Amway, and his brother, Doug, has served as the company’s president since 2002. In 2014, Amway joined with Alfa Bank to create an “Alfa-Amway” loyalty-card program in Russia. But such connections are circumstantial at best; the DeVos family seems far more clearly linked to Trump than to Russia.
If Trump and Alfa Bank—as well as Spectrum Health and Heartland Payment Systems—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. Max told me that no one in his group had been contacted. But, he said, it wasn’t necessary for anyone in the F.B.I. to talk to him, if the agents gathered the right information from other sources, like Listrak and Cendyn. “I hope Mueller has all of it,” he said.