MOSCOW (Sputnik) — On Monday, the Slate online magazine published an article claiming that a team of computer scientists had discovered a closed channel of communication between the Trump Organization's server and two servers belonging to Alfa-Bank, one of Russia's largest privately-owned banks.
"First of all, it’s not a secret server. The email server, set up for marketing purposes and operated by a third-party, has not been used since 2010. The current traffic on the server from Alphabank’s IP address is regular DNS server traffic – not email traffic," Trump campaign press secretary Hope Hicks said, as quoted by The Guardian newspaper.
The report has also been refuted by Alfa-Bank, which states that the detected activity may have been spam mail.
On October 7, the US government formally accused Russia of trying to meddle with the results of the US presidential elections. Russian top officials have denied the allegations, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, who said on October 27 that Russia did not have a favorite in the US presidential race but would cooperate with whoever wins the election and slammed the attempts to link Trump to Russia as a "simple means of political struggle, and a method of manipulating public opinion" on the eve of the election.