Donald Trump: questions about his ties to Russia. Credit:Bloomberg "A former senior Western intelligence operative, a specialist in Russian counterintelligence deemed credible in Washington, has provided the FBI with evidence that Trump 'and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on Clinton, since Russian intelligence had compromised Trump during his visits to Moscow – so that he could be blackmailed'. "The intelligence report, which the operative had provided to the FBI, reads: 'Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance'. "The Clinton data was a dossier based on bugged conversations by Clinton during various visits to Moscow and on intercepted phone calls, it says. "Initially retained by a Republican client, but later by a Democrat, to research Trump, the operative said his investigations confirmed the existence of an 'established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit'.

Election-era street art in Lithuania purports to show the extent of the special relationship between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Credit:AP "After multiple exchanges and information sharing about Trump and his inner circle with the FBI since August 2016, the operative concluded: 'It's quite clear there was or is a pretty substantial [FBI] inquiry going on'. Here's what The New York Times is reporting: A protester during a demonstration at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, in July. Credit:Bloomberg "For much of the summer just gone, the FBI investigated the Russia-Trump links, looking at Trump, his advisers and for any financial links to Moscow – they found nothing conclusive; and on the hacking of the Democratic computers, the FBI and others in the intelligence community now believed the objective was more about disrupting the presidential election than about giving Trump a leg-up.

Here's what Slate is reporting: A woman wears a shirt reading 'Trump Putin '16' while waiting for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at Plymouth State University. Credit:AP "In the wake of new reports earlier this year on Russia hacking the computers of the Democratic National Committee, a group of respected university, government and private cyber security experts in the US, embarked on an investigation, based on a working theory that if the Clinton camp was being hacked, it was highly likely that the Trump campaign also would be targeted. "Detecting what he initially believed to be malware emanating from Russia, with the name Trump in, one of the experts who goes by the code name Tea Leaves, drilled down – what he found was a bank in Moscow irregularly pinging a server registered to the Trump Organisation on Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton labelled Donald Trump as a 'puppet' of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Credit:AP

"Deeper drilling by six members of the group, some of whom are Republicans and others of whom can't be identified because of the nature of their government and corporate work, uncovered an irregular pattern of server look-ups that actually resembled the pattern of human conversation – conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. "It dawned on the researchers that this wasn't an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organisation and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank." Russian President Vladimir Putin has a poor record on LGBTQI rights. Credit:AP This was a capacious server, first registered by the Trump organisation in 2009, for use in mass-email consumer marketing campaigns. But now it handled strangely light traffic, so small it would be hard to justify the expense and trouble of maintain it. Christopher Davis, who runs the cyber security firm HYAS InfoSecand has been the winner of an FBI award for his work tracking the authors of one of the world's nastiest botnet attacks, told Slate: "It looked weird, and it didn't pass the sniff test."

With the bulk of the contacts from the Trump server involving two Alfa Bank servers, one of the cyber group, Indiana University computer scientist L. Jean Camp, told Slate: "These organisations are communicating in a way designed to block other people out." Early in October the group consulted one of the world's foremost cyber experts – Paul Vixie, author of the central strands of the DNS code that is essential to the functioning of the internet world. On examining the group's research records, he concluded that, "the parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive. This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project." Translated, what Vixie was saying, was that it appeared Trump and Alfa Bank had created the equivalent of a digital hotline between their operations, shutting out the rest of the world, and it was designed to obscure its own existence. Further, timeline studies showed that the communication traffic peaked in parallel with the intensity of political developments in the US.

On September 21, The New York Times, which was researching the same story independently, approached Alfa Bank's Washington representatives as part of its research – and very soon after, the cyber experts observed that the Trump domain name they had been monitoring suddenly ceased functioning – "the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York," one of the experts claimed. Four days later, on September 27, the Trump organisation created a new host name, trump1.contact-client.com, which enabled communication to the very same server via a different route – and the first attempt to contact it came from Alfa Bank. But the new host name was killed off, even before it got up a head of steam. Approached by Slate, the Trump organisation acknowledged the existence of the server, but denied the existence of any back channel communications with Russia. According to The New York Times , the FBI spent weeks examining data on the stream of activity between the Trump server and Alfa Bank servers, including a log showing that the Alfa Bank servers sent more than 2700 "look-up" messages – but the agency concluded there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts. So what have we got here?

A candidate who boosts Russian leader Vladimir Putin at every opportunity; who reportedly had the Republican platform on Ukraine rewritten; who sings from the Moscow song sheet on undermining NATO and Washington's commitment to its allies; and who invited Moscow to hack the DNC computers. A candidate whose former campaign manager Paul Manafort was on the payroll of disgraced former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and whose adviser Carter Page has energy interests in Russia. And a Russian bank with a rags-to-riches Ukrainian oligarch as its founder – Mikhail Fridman, who ran a window-washing company before he bought the Bolshevik Biscuit Factory – I kid you not – in the post Soviet carve-up of state assets and later, with some former university friends, established Alfa Bank. These days, Fridman is reportedly worth more than $US15 billion ($A20 billion) and is the second richest man in Russia. Fridman has on his payroll a certain Pyotr Aven, an economist, who worked with Putin in his St Petersburg days and who reportedly helped Putin, several times, to beat the wrap on charges of corruption. These two have positioned themselves in Moscow's corridors of power and they're doing alright in Washington too – they have endowed a prestigious fellowship; the government-funded Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, gave Aven its 2015 award for "Corporate Citizenship;" they've had meetings at the White House; and the man who authored Trump's first big foreign policy speech, Richard Burt, sits on Alfa's senior advisory board.

In Washington, there's a bunch of politicians and investigators trying to join the dots – and over at the FBI a bunch of spooks saying that they don't join up. At this stage, you might well ask – where's the sex? Loading I'm glad you asked. Well, no sooner did the Mother Jones report appear on its website, than a woman by the name of Andrea Chalupa, self described author and journalist, bobbed up on Twitter, with this message: "In intel circles, the story goes, FSB [formerly the KGB] filmed Trump in an orgy while in Russia. Yes, this all ends in a Trump sex tape." Wouldn't believe it, would you?