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For the atlantic. natasha bertrand is a staff writer for the atlantic. frank, starting with you, you wrote a great piece reflecting back two years ago. i remember that piece. everyone's denying it. what did you learn, how was the story advanced in the two years since you've first wrote about it? >> well, it's only margin ally a advanced. the lot of computer scientists were looking at this data in realtime and they said there's something raem funny here that this bank in moscow is communicating with the trump campaign. there was a whole series of suspicious, very circumstantial pieces of eviden...

Shut down after the times contacted alpha bank's representatives, but before the newspaper contacted trump. max, who's one of the computer scientists, an alias, says that shows a human interaction. that is pretty weird. >> i mean, what more evidence do you need? it's very, very obvious. and it's really razor here, the fact we've still not been able to rule out the idea that was a covert communication channel -- no one has come forth with a plausible explanation for why this is happening, why it's one of three organizations communicating with the trump server in the months leading up to the ele...

Had been shut down after -- so "the new york times" is reporting on the story. they contact the alpha bank, moscow bank, the domain gets shut down after the times contacted alpha bank's representatives, but before the newspaper contacted trump. max, who's one of the computer scientists, an alias, says that shows a human interaction. that is pretty weird. >> i mean, what more evidence do you need? it's very, very obvious. and it's really razor here, the fact we've still not been able to rule out the idea that was a covert communication channel -- no one has come forth with a plausible explanati...

Messaging function that's super simple and super quick. but if i ever wanted to communicate with somebody on my staff somewhere on the other end of the earth and i wanted it to not go as e-mail for some reason and they could log into our script system and we could use that system to talk back and forth no matter where you were. that sort of back and forth communication would leave the kind of trail that these computer scientists have found. >> yes. which is so say not very much. not so many fingerprints, but they do leave dns records. >> so the content of the communications remains the holy gr...

Get at the core of it, unless you're great with words. that said, for me, the ah-ha moment in your reporting was some of the stuff about "the new york times" and what they chose to public and not before the election, but also what you explained about what this might have been. you go through a lot of the scenarios about some of the innocuous explanations for what this could have been. it could have been spam, internet noise, it could have been all these other things, none of which seemed to fit. and you said, here are some things that might fit. >> yes. >> in that case, you said, it's not e-ma...