A Nonsense QAnon Conspiracy Theory Ended Up In Donald Trump's Call To the Ukrainian President -- And
Source: BuzzFeed News
A Nonsense QAnon Conspiracy Theory Ended Up In Donald Trump’s Call To the Ukrainian President — And The Impeachment Investigation
From the depths of 4chan, promoted by Russian media, to the president’s mouth, and then back to the depths of 4chan.
Ryan Broderick
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on September 26, 2019, at 4:59 p.m. ET
The White House released the record of a call between President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday. According to the document, Trump asked Zelensky to do him a “favor” and investigate the origins of the Russia probe as well as former vice president Joe Biden.
As the country’s mainstream media swarmed over the staff-written memorandum of the conversation, anonymous radicalized communities like 4chan and far-right pockets of Facebook, Reddit, and Telegram focused on something else. It wasn’t the possible abuse of power that sent them into a fervor, but instead the American president’s mention of CrowdStrike, a company that provides security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services, and which the Democratic National Committee hired to investigate the hack of its servers during the 2016 election campaign.
In the memorandum, Trump says to Zelensky, “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.”
One large 4chan thread was titled “HAPPENING: CROWDSTRIKE SERVER RELEASE IMMINENT,” another, “What is CrowdStrike, and why does their server seem to be important?” and another, “ULTIMATE HAPPENING: Trump mentions CROWDSTRIKE in Transcript release, Tied to DNC server & Seth Rich.”
CrowdStrike's role in a sprawling conspiracy carried out by the DNC started as wild conjecture on anonymous message boards in the lead up to the 2016 election. The flames were fanned by Russian news outlets like Russia Today and Sputnik News, who both published multiple pieces about it. It was then laundered into mainstream Republican discourse by figures like Roger Stone, Trump's former campaign adviser.
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Read more: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/crowdstrike-4chan-qanon-conspiracy-theory
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