The CrowdStrike Conspiracy: Here’s Why Trump Keeps Referencing The Cybersecurity Firm – Forbes

Topline: President Trump’s obsession with the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike—mentioned by him in both the call records to the Ukraine president and by the whistleblower in his complaint about Trump—references a right-wing conspiracy that theorizes that Russia’s hack of the Democratic National Committee’s servers in 2016 is an elaborate ruse, devised to discredit Trump’s victory. 

• Silicon Valley-based CrowdStrike was hired in 2016 by the DNC to investigate the origins of the hack. The company didn’t give the DNC’s physical server to the FBI, which has been seized on by conspiracy theorists as evidence of a cover up.
• According to the false theory, which has been prominent on right-wing blogs and news websites and repeated by Trump and former campaign consultant Roger Stone, Democrats and CrowdStrike concocted evidence to frame Russia for the hack in order to discredit Trump’s win in 2016.
• The supposed evidence of Russia’s innocence relies on the belief that a DNC server has been hidden in Ukraine, possibly by CrowdStrike’s cofounder Dmitri Alperovitch.
• That belief may stem from the fact that Trump erroneously said in a 2017 interview with the Associated Press, in which Trump questioned why the FBI didn’t look at the DNC server, that CrowdStrike is owned by “a very rich Ukrainian.” Alperovitch is actually a Russian-born American citizen.
• Breitbart and the Daily Caller also claim Alperovitch has anti-Russia leanings, solely because he’s a nonresident senior fellow of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, which the outlets claim takes a hawkish stance against Russia, and is funded by left-wing billionaire George Soros.
• In a statement to Forbes, a spokesperson CrowdStrike stated: “With regards to our investigation of the DNC hack in 2016, we provided all forensic evidence and analysis to the FBI. As we’ve stated before, we stand by our findings and conclusions that have been fully supported by the US Intelligence community.”

Crucial quote: “The server, they say Ukraine has it,” Trump said on the phone call with Zelensky, according to records of the exchange.

Key background: Trump has frequently raised questions about the “missing DNC server” and why the FBI never got to look at it. He even brought it up standing next to Vladimir Putin at the now-infamous 2018 Helsinki meeting, where Trump refused to acknowledge Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election (“You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why didn’t they take the server? Where is the server, I want to know, and what is the server saying?”).

But, as Vice reported, turning over the physical server isn’t necessary (or the usual procedure) for forensic analyses, and it isn’t as useful as a copy of what was on the server at the time, which CrowdStrike provided to the FBI. And independent security experts and U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed that Russia was behind the hack, using Crowdstrike’s evidence and more than what was found on one server. 

News peg: According to the whistleblower complaint released Thursday,  Trump requested that “the Ukrainian leader locate and turn over servers used by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and examined by the U.S. cyber security firm CrowdStrike, which initially reported that Russian hackers had penetrated the DNC’s networks in 2016.” 

What we don’t know: Who exactly first came up with the conspiracy.

Tangent: Since the DNC investigation,  the Sunnyvale, California, company, which sells subscription software that uses artificial intelligence technology, has grown steadily. When it went public in June, its stock soared 70%, making CEO George Kurtz a billionaire.