President Trump directly referred to a “favor” he wanted from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the July 25 conversation that’s the subject of a whistleblower complaint, but it apparently related to the 2016 election, not Joe Biden or his son Hunter Biden.
According to the transcript, Trump asked Zelensky to look into cybersecurity company CrowdStrike’s conclusion that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee in 2016.
“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 said. “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. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation.”
Trump’s belief that a Ukrainian owns the California company and that the DNC’s server might be in Ukraine seems to be related to a long-standing conspiracy theory. CrowdStrike was co-founded by Dmitri Alperovitch, a Russian-born U.S. citizen. A tenuous Ukrainian connection is that Alperovitch serves as a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, which receives funding from Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian billionaire who has donated to the Clinton Foundation. The DNC also had more than 100 servers, not just one.
The conversation between the two presidents took place the day after Robert Mueller’s lackluster congressional testimony on the findings of his Trump-Russia investigation. Mueller’s report, released in April, concluded that Russian military intelligence interfered in the 2016 presidential election, 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.
In the conversation with Zelensky, Trump linked Zelensky’s hopes for future purchasing of weaponry from the United States to Ukraine agreeing to look into CrowdStrike and other 2016 issues. The hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid appropriated by Congress for Ukraine, delayed by Trump for weeks, were released earlier in September.
CrowdStrike, the firm hired by the DNC to investigate the hack in 2016, concluded it was the Russians, and Mueller concurred. Although neither CrowdStrike nor the DNC ever provided the FBI with access to the DNC’s severs, 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 upon CrowdStrike’s assessment, the Justice Department said that was “incorrect” and that the indictment of GRU officers in 2018 was based upon information obtained by Mueller’s team.
Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on the U.S. government’s assessment that it was the Russians who interfered in 2016. Trump told the Washington Examiner in an April 2017 interview that “Russia is a faux story” and referenced CrowdStrike without naming it, alleging that it was owned by a Ukrainian.
“Nobody asks John Podesta why he didn’t let the FBI look at his server, why did they hire another company to look at the server,” Trump said in 2017. “And somebody had mentioned — and this may be incorrect — a company that’s owned by somebody from the Ukraine. You’ve heard that, I assume you’ve heard that?”
The White House transcript shows the July call began with Trump congratulating Zelensky on his party’s parliamentary victory days before. But Trump moved the conversation toward the assistance the U.S. provides Ukraine.
“I will say that we do a lot for Ukraine,” Trump said. “We spend a lot of effort and a lot of time. Much more than the European countries are doing and they should be helping you more than they are.”
Trump said, “I wouldn’t say that it’s been reciprocal necessarily because things are happening that are not good.”
Zelensky replied that he was “grateful” for the U.S.’ help and that it was “much more than the European Union, especially when we are talking about sanctions against the Russian Federation.”
“I would also like to thank you for your great support in the area of defense,” Zelensky said. “We are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps. Specifically, we are almost ready to buy more Javelins [anti-tank missiles] from the United States for defense purposes.”
Trump immediately responded by asking for the CrowdStrike favor and told Zelensky he wanted to have Attorney General William Barr call him and wanted Zelensky “to get to the bottom of it.”
“As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine,” Trump said. “Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it, if that’s possible.”
“Yes it is,” Zelensky replied. “It’s very important for me and everything that you just mentioned earlier.”
Later in the call, Trump urged Zelensky to investigate “the other thing”, which he made clear was the allegations of corruption related to the Bidens.“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution, and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great,” Trump said.
The Justice Department denied Trump asked Barr to speak with Ukraine, although it said U.S. Attorney John Durham is looking into any role Ukraine may have played in 2016 election interference.
“With regards to our investigation of the DNC hack in 2016, we provided all forensic evidence and analysis to the FBI,” CrowdStrike said in a statement Wednesday.
Aside from calling for Biden and his son to be investigated over allegations of corrupt business dealings in Ukraine, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani has also insisted that some Ukrainians interfered in 2016 on behalf of Clinton, pointing to a Ukrainian activist’s release of information that emerged in the summer of 2016 implicating Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Serhiy Leshchenko, a Ukrainian activist who revealed in August 2016 a “black ledger” purportedly showing millions in secretive payments from ousted pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to Manafort, denies he was trying to help Clinton.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko said last weekend that “all these speculations that Ukraine helped the Democrats, that we wanted President Clinton instead of President Trump, this is a result of misinformation and evil intentions of certain people.”
