When President Donald Trump brought up the word “Crowdstrike” on his now-infamous July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president, he caused some head-scratching in Kyiv. According to two sources familiar with the call, aides to President Volodymyr Zelensky who listened to the call had no idea what Trump was talking about when he urged the newly elected Ukrainian leader to look into a mysterious “server” supposedly hidden somewhere in Ukraine.
At that time, Trump’s obsession with the debunked conspiracy theory was understood and embraced perhaps only by his staunchest allies—but now even they don’t appear to see the Crowdstrike theory as a viable defense in the impeachment inquiry (perhaps not least because nobody knows what the hell it is).
So, why did the Russian-friendly theory fail to gain steam?
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Lost in translation: One of the sources who revealed Ukraine’s bafflement about Trump’s request, a Zelensky administration official who was on the call, told The Daily Beast that he Googled Crowdstrike after the conversation.
“If you go and ask Ukrainians about Crowdstrike, you’ll get a very limited response,” the official said. “The vast majority of people have never heard of Crowdstrike.”
In 2016, Russian intelligence officers hacked into the Democratic National Committee’s server and stole thousands of emails. Wikileaks subsequently published thousands of those emails, causing a huge headache for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic party. Special Counsel Robert Mueller charged a dozen Russian intelligence officers for crimes related to the hack.
The myth that won’t quit: But for years now, as The Daily Beast detailed in September, Russian trolls and pundits have promoted a conspiracy theory that basically argues that the opposite happened–that Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm which the DNC hired to investigate the hack, fabricated evidence to frame Russia for the intrusion. The theory’s adherents believe that Crowdstrike’s founder is Ukrainian (he isn’t) and that the DNC wouldn’t let the FBI scrutinize its servers (it did).
Trump often alludes to the theory. The president has tweeted “the server” more than two dozen times over the last two years, asking why the DNC didn’t give it to the FBI. And he brought it up on the call with Zelensky.
“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike,” he said, according to a White House summary of the call. “I guess you have one of your wealthy people. The server, they say Ukraine has it.”
Crowd who? The Ukrainian officials baffled by Trump’s reference to Crowdstrike aren’t the only ones scratching their heads about the president’s obsession. During the House impeachment hearings on Wednesday, Democrats pressed the Trump administration’s own top diplomat, George Kent, about the mention of the company in the July 25 phone call.
“To be honest, I had not heard of Crowdstrike until I read this transcript on September 25th,” Kent testified, nor was he aware of any Ukrainian connection to the company. Kent also told lawmakers that “there is no factual basis” to the belief that lies behind the Crowdstrike conspiracy theory—the idea that somehow Ukraine, and not Russia, was behind the 2016 hacking operations against Democrats.
Clownstrike: It’s a testament to just how far out Trump is with his Crowdstrike theory that not even his most conspiracy-friendly defenders are willing to climb aboard the missing server train.
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the top Republican on the House intelligence committee, spent much of the Russia investigation proffering dark tales of Trump dossier author Christopher Steele working with the Russian government to discredit Trump and the FBI.
During Wednesday’s hearing, he carried on in that tradition and spun a series of new conspiracy theories about Ukraine. He claimed that the “black ledger” showing corrupt payments from Ukraine’s ousted former president to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was phony. The allegation is contradicted by exhibits and testimony in the tax and bank fraud trial that sent Manafort to prison, but Nunes was undeterred on Wednesday. Building off the black ledger theory, Nunes also claimed that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 election to Trump’s detriment through a former DNC staffer, Alexandra Chalupa.
But even Nunes appeared to avoid mentioning Crowdstrike by name, even as he expressed indignation about the witnesses being “uninformed” about “indications of Ukrainian election meddling.” Other House Republicans steered clear as well, with none of them raising the issue throughout the hearing. Just a few weeks after a summary of Trump’s phone call with Zelensky was released, some were backing away from it. When asked about the missing server theory, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) told Politico last month that he wasn’t a believer and wouldn’t “send a private attorney looking for some server in a foreign country.”
Et tu, Rudy? The most damning backpedaling on Crowdstrike, however, comes from the man some accuse of putting the conspiracy in Trump’s head in the first place.
Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani was allegedly all-in on the Crowdstrike-Ukraine theory up until recently. So much so that he apparently drove Trump’s former Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert up a wall with it.
“I am deeply frustrated in what he and the legal team is doing and repeating that debunked theory to the President,” Bossert told ABC News of Giuliani and the Crowdstrike story. “It sticks in the President's mind when he hears it over and over again.” Giuliani responded by claiming that he’d “never engaged in any theory that the Ukrainians did the hacking.”
Whether he did engage in it back then, he’s certainly not now. In an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal this week, Giuliani laid out many of the same conspiracy theories in what reads like the semi-official talking points for Trump’s impeachment defense. Like Nunes on Wednesday, Giuliani claims that the Manafort “black ledger” was forged and that a former DNC staffer worked with the Ukraine government to interfere in the 2016 elections.
Absent entirely from those talking points: any mention of Crowdstrike and the supposed missing DNC server.
