A friend wrote to me yesterday and asked it I could explain what Donald Trump is trying to get at when he invokes the name CrowdStrike. What follows, slightly edited, is my response to him. I thought that I’d share it here as well, as some of you, I suspect, may find yourselves in conversations with relatives over Thanksgiving who have a less than firm grasp on the tiller of reality.
OK, first of all, to set the stage, here’s Donald Trump talking about CrowdStrike on Fox and Friends this past Friday.
They all look so pained.
Trump: They have the server from the DNC
Kilmeade: Who has the server?
Trump: They gave the server to Crowdstrike, which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian.
Doocy: Are you SURE they did that? pic.twitter.com/Si1rUqelq1— Holly Figueroa O'Reilly (@AynRandPaulRyan) November 22, 2019
As you’ll recall, the subject of CrowdStrike also came up in Donald Trump’s now infamous July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. After Zelensky tells Trump that he would like to acquire more Javelin anti-tank weapons systems from the United States in order to help push back invading Russian forces, Trump responds with the following.
Alright, but what does all of that mean? Why is Donald Trump rambling about the Sunnyvale, California-based cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which, by the way, contrary to what Donald Trump apparently thinks, is not owned by a wealthy Ukrainian, and does not have possession of a Democratic National Committee server?
Well, to start to make sense of it all, we have to go back to the July 27, 2016 hacking of Democratic Party emails by the Russian government, a fact which, as you know, has since been corroborated by every single one of our nation’s 17 intelligence agencies. Well, it would appear as though not everyone is convinced. And among those who aren’t convinced just happens to be the President of the United States, who famously stood on a stage in Helsinki, Finland in June of 2018, and said that he accepted the word of Vladimir Putin, who had told him that the Russians didn’t do it, over the unanimous assessment of our U.S. intelligence agencies. And that’s what all this is about.
Today, when you hear Donald Trump mention “CrowdStrike,” it’s shorthand for an alternate reality in which Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election on the behalf of the Trump campaign… an alternate reality in which, instead, the Democratic Party, working with the Ukrainians, hacked their own server in order to frame the Russians. [It’s unclear to me why, if the Democrats had the wherewithal to carry out such a sophisticated operation, they wouldn’t have instead just hacked the Trump campaign, and put Clinton in the White House, but I guess their sinister plan to bring socialism to America must have required that the Republicans first be allowed to pack the courts with conservative justices, give enormous tax breaks to the wealthy, and dismantle the social safety net.]
OK, with all of that said, here’s a little more background from the Washington Post.
…The Democratic National Committee was hacked in 2016. The hack was conducted by Russia, as The Post reported at the time and as determined in part by analysis of the DNC network by the California-based firm CrowdStrike. Since Russian culpability was problematic to both Trump and Russia at the time, their defenders looked for ways to undermine the attribution. Some settled on the idea that CrowdStrike’s analysis was suspect because one of the firm’s co-founders is part of a nonprofit organization that receives funding from a wealthy Ukrainian. Bingo-bongo, you’ve got yourself a conspiracy theory.
It’s wrong in two ways. The first and most obvious is that there’s no evidence at all that the third-degree relationship of the Ukrainian in any way affects CrowdStrike’s work. The other way in which it’s wrong is that CrowdStrike wasn’t the only group to determine that Russia was responsible. In fact, the government determined that independently, and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III obtained indictments against a dozen Russians that included detailed analysis of how the hack was conducted and the stolen material distributed.
Trump has constantly questioned the DNC hacking in various ways, lifting up questions about it as a way of offering slivers of doubt about Russia’s role — and by extension the validity of the Russia probe, in which members of his campaign were implicated. He spoke regularly, for example, about how the DNC didn’t turn over “its server” to the FBI, a claim that’s goofy because (a) there wasn’t a server at the DNC but instead a cloud-based network of databases that was accessed, and (b) the FBI got images of the necessary devices, which were precise copies of what those devices contained. Trump, not an IT specialist, thinks of this as being like a crime scene where someone isn’t handing over a fingerprint-covered knife. That’s not how it works…
OK, so are you following this? CrowdStrike, just to sum up, isn’t a Ukrainian company, and it isn’t owned by a wealthy Ukrainian. It’s a respected U.S. cybersecurity company, started by ex-McAfee executives, that was hired by the DNC to assess the damage of the 2016 hack and insure that the same thing could not happen again. And, to reiterate, they did not abscond with a physical server that is now being hidden in Ukraine, as the President continues to claim. The DNC hack actually involved 140 servers, most of which were cloud-based, and none of which are actually “missing”.
So, when Donald Trump says on Fox and Friends, “You know, the FBI’s never gotten that server. Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?”, it’s absolute and total bullshit. There never was a single DNC server. The FBI had access to everything, and reached the same conclusion as CrowdStrike as to who was responsible for the hack. And no Ukrainian company was ever involved. None of this is actually up for debate in the real world, where everyone knows exactly what happened. If you don’t believe me, just read the Mueller report, where it’s all laid out in exquisite detail.
As Robert Mueller himself said at the time of his report’s release, “Russian intelligence officers who are part of the Russian military launched a concerted attack on our political system… (T)hey used sophisticated cyber-techniques to hack into computers and networks used by the Clinton campaign. They stole private information and then released that information through fake online identities and through the organization WikiLeaks. The releases were designed and timed to interfere with our election and to damage a presidential candidate.”
But, as they’re known to do, the Russians offered an alternative reality, one which took root here in America through the conspiracy-friendly message board 4chan, and has since made its way to the very top of the Republican Party. Here, with more on that, is an excerpt from NBC News.
…An anonymous post from March 2017 on the far-right 4chan message board teased a conspiracy theory that would eventually make its way to the White House.
“Russia could not have been the source of leaked Democrat emails released by Wikileaks,” the post teased, not citing any evidence for the assertion.
The post baselessly insinuated that CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm that worked with the Democratic National Committee and had been contracted to investigate a hack of its servers, fabricated a forensics report to frame Russia for election interference. The 4chan post was published three days before then-FBI Director James Comey testified before Congress about Russian interference in the 2016 election.
And that was how it started. That post is the first known written evidence of this unfounded conspiracy theory to exonerate Russia from meddling in the 2016 election, which more than two years later would make its way into the telephone call that may get President Donald Trump impeached. (Federal law enforcement officials have repeatedly made it clear that Russia unquestionably did meddle in the election.)
In the years that followed the original 4chan post, at least three different but related conspiracy theories would warp and combine on the fringes of the internet, eventually coalescing around Ukraine’s supposed role in helping Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Ukraine wasn’t originally part of the theory, but in July, Trump floated CrowdStrike’s name during a call with the president of Ukraine as just one piece of a convoluted conspiracy accusation…
So, Ukraine wasn’t originally part of the CrowdStrike conspiracy theory. That part was just added recently. And that, my friends, is how we came to be where we are today… and why Republican elected officials, like Senator John Kennedy, are saying publicly that Russia may not have been responsible for the 2016 hack, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary… Just check this out.
WALLACE: Senator Kennedy, who do you believe was responsible for hacking the DNC & Clinton campaign? Russia or Ukraine?
KENNEDY: I don't know. Nor do you.
W: The entire intel community says it was Russia.
K: Right. But it could be Ukraine. Fiona Hill is entitled to her opinion pic.twitter.com/KQAUkWeJIo
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 24, 2019
For what it’s worth, it was reported last week that U.S. Senators were recently briefed by intelligence officials who made it clear to them that Russia has initiated an active measures campaign designed to shift blame for what happened in 2016 to Ukraine. The following excerpt is from the New York Times.
…Republicans have sought for weeks amid the impeachment inquiry to shift attention to President Trump’s demands that Ukraine investigate any 2016 election meddling, defending it as a legitimate concern while Democrats accuse Mr. Trump of pursuing fringe theories for his benefit.
The Republican defense of Mr. Trump became central to the impeachment proceedings when Fiona Hill, a respected Russia scholar and former senior White House official, added a harsh critique during testimony on Thursday. She told some of Mr. Trump’s fiercest defenders in Congress that they were repeating “a fictional narrative” — and that it likely came from a disinformation campaign by Russian security services, which themselves propagated it.
In a briefing that closely aligned with Dr. Hill’s testimony, American intelligence officials informed senators and their aides in recent weeks that Russia had engaged in a yearslong campaign to essentially frame Ukraine as responsible for Moscow’s own hacking of the 2016 election, according to three American officials. The briefing came as Republicans stepped up their defenses of Mr. Trump in the Ukraine affair.
The revelations demonstrate Russia’s persistence in trying to sow discord among its adversaries — and show that the Kremlin apparently succeeded, as unfounded claims about Ukrainian interference seeped into Republican talking points. American intelligence agencies believe Moscow is likely to redouble its efforts as the 2020 presidential campaign intensifies. The classified briefing for senators also focused on Russia’s evolving influence tactics, including its growing ability to better disguise operations…
So that’s where we are today. Not only did Dr. Fiona Hill testify before the House Intelligence Committee, warning the Republicans of the damage they were doing by parroting Kremlin-authored conspiracy theories, but members of the intelligence community have been briefing members of Congress behind closed doors on the same subject. For some reason, however, Republicans continue to aid the Russians in their quest, pushing the false narrative that it was Ukraine, and not Russia, that interfered in our 2016 election.
Here, because I can never share it enough, is video of Fiona Hill testifying last week before the House Intelligence Committee. Please watch it and share it with everyone you know.
"I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a U.S. adversary, and that Ukraine, not Russia, attacked us in 2016," ex-NSC Russia expert Fiona Hill says in opening testimony. https://t.co/YDS6cnBYZY #ImpeachmentHearings pic.twitter.com/LfXYRYij2b
— ABC News (@ABC) November 23, 2019
