What You Need to Know About Trump's Crowdstrike Conspiracy Theory
WASHINGTON — President Trump is our conspiracy-theorist-in-chief. The newly released readout of his phone call with the leader of Ukraine yet again confirms it.
According to the read-out of the conversation released by the White House, Trump used his July 25th congratulatory call with the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to not only ask him to investigate former vice president Joe Biden but also to investigate an American cybersecurity company named Crowdstrike.
“I would like you to do us a favor, though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it,” Trump tells Zelensky, according to the readout. “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine. They say Crowdstrike…I guess you have one of your wealthy people…The server, they say Ukraine has it.”
Here’s the context needed to understand Trump’s disturbing, if somewhat incoherent, request.
Crowdstrike is a well-known cybersecurity firm based in the U.S. that the Democratic National Committee hired to investigate the successful hacking operation in 2016 that targeted the DNC. In June 2016, Crowdstrike concluded that two hacking operations — one known as Fancy Bear and the other Cozy Bear — were responsible for the devastating cyberattack on the DNC. Both Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear had strong connections to the Russian government, Crowdstrike said — a conclusion that was later confirmed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
On the far-right fringes, however, a conspiracy theory formed that Crowdstrike was somehow part of a Deep State plot to wrongly blame Russia for the DNC hack. This theory claims that because the DNC and Crowdstrike didn’t give the FBI the “server” that was hacked, that was evidence of a cover-up. In Trump’s regurgitating of this theory to the Ukrainian president he also seemed to suggest that the DNC server in question had ended up in Ukraine because, as Trump has falsely claimed, Crowdstrike has Ukrainian owners.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/what-is-the-crowdstrike-conspiracy-theory-890459/
= new reply since forum marked as read
