Call it President Trump’s insanity defense — and that’s a joke, but hear me out.
Based on his freewheeling interview with Fox & Friends, Trump genuinely believed that Russia had not worked with WikiLeaks to continue a decadeslong effort to sow dissent in free democracies by hacking the poorly protected Democratic National Committee server in 2016. Instead, Trump thought that Ukraine had framed Russia for the 2016 meddling and that in addition there is a CrowdStrike server sitting in some Ukrainian basement that could prove it all.
“The FBI went in and said, ‘We’re not giving it to you.’ They gave the server to CrowdStrike, which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian,” Trump told Fox News. “And I still want to see that server. You know the FBI has still never gotten that server. That is a big part of this whole thing. Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?”
When host Steve Doocy pushed back on the claim, Trump doubled down on the assertion, claiming that this was why he asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate corruption in the July 25 phone call.
There are just a few problems. For starters, CrowdStrike isn’t some Ukrainian corporation owned by “a very wealthy Ukrainian” as Trump asserted on television. It’s a publicly traded security firm ($CRWD) based in California and co-founded by an American born in — wait for it — Russia. A New York private equity firm where Trump’s ambassador to India used to work is CrowdStrike’s largest outside stakeholder. And although the DNC did hire the company to transmit its data to the FBI for investigation, there’s no single “server” at all.
This is how the Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy summarized special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings of Russia’s undeniable attempts to interfere with our elections:
In its case against Trump associate Roger Stone, DOJ argued that Mueller’s investigation did not rely solely on CrowdStrike and its investigation “gathered evidence showing that GRU officers hacked the DNC systems as well as the DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] and email accounts of people working for the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, published hacked information pseudonymously, and transferred stolen data to organization 1 [WikiLeaks].”
…
CrowdStrike is used by both Republicans and Democrats, and although Democratic groups are larger clients, spending many hundreds of thousands of dollars since 2017, Republican groups also continue to contract with CrowdStrike, including a $40,000 payment from the National Republican Congressional Committee as recently as June 2019.
In short, the CrowdStrike conspiracy theory’s plausibility ranks somewhere between “9/11 was an inside job” and “the government staged Marilyn Monroe’s suicide.” It’s about 100 times more likely that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself. Yet Trump seems to be making clear that this tinfoil thinking infiltrate the highest echelons of our foreign policy.
But it gets better, because oddly enough, this may be Trump’s strongest possible defense.
If Trump genuinely believes that Ukraine framed Russia for hacking the DNC server and that some Chappaqua-style server exists in Kyiv proving it all, then he can argue that his demands on Ukraine were intended to get justice for our electoral process, not just to advance his own personal political agenda. Such an embarrassingly ignorant error would not make Trump impeachable, even if it would make him unelectable in 2020.
