President Trump deflected questions about his lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Ukraine by bringing up the debunked CrowdStrike conspiracy theory that played a part in the “favor” he wanted from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in their July phone call.
When asked about Giuliani’s work with Ukraine, Trump told White House reporters he didn’t know what Giuliani had done, then shifted the conversation to his long-standing skepticism of the Intelligence Community’s conclusion that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee’s email servers during the 2016 election.
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“You’d have to ask Rudy those questions. Rudy was one of many people who was incensed at the corruption that took place during that election. Pure corruption,” Trump said. “For instance, I still ask the FBI — where is the server? How come the FBI never got the server from the DNC? Where is the server? I want to see the server. Let’s see what’s on the server.”
The cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike examined the DNC’s servers and concluded the hack was by Russia, a conclusion shared by special counsel Robert Mueller. Mueller’s report concluded that Russian military intelligence interfered in 2016, in part by hacking Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s email account and the DNC’s email system, then providing those emails to WikiLeaks.
Trump continued that “the server, they say, is held by a company whose primary ownership individual is from Ukraine. I’d like to see the server. I think it’s very important for this country to see the server.”
California-based CrowdStrike was co-founded by Dmitri Alperovitch, a Russian-born U.S. citizen. A tenuous Ukrainian connection is that Alperovitch is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, which receives funding from Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian billionaire who donated to the Clinton Foundation. The DNC had more than 100 servers.
Trump brought up similar claims with Zelensky in the July phone call that has sparked a congressional impeachment inquiry, asking the Ukrainian president to look into CrowdStrike’s conclusions immediately after Zelensky expressed interest in purchasing anti-tank weaponry, known as Javelins, from the U.S. Trump urged Zelensky later in the call to investigate “the other thing,” meaning the allegations of corruption related to Joe and Hunter Biden.
Neither CrowdStrike nor the DNC provided the FBI with access to the DNC’s servers, though Mueller’s office said it came to its conclusions about Russian culpability separately. Responding to Trump associate Roger Stone’s claims that the government relied solely on CrowdStrike, the Justice Department said that was “incorrect.”
