Silicon Valley-based CrowdStrike was hired in 2016 by the DNC to investigate the origins of the hack.Rachel Sandler breaks it down at Forbes thus: This is a reference to what is known as the “Crowdstrike” conspiracy theory, a very fringe right-wing conspiracy theory so bizarre it barely makes it way onto onto Fox News. And one of the most important questions we should be asking is where he got that information.įirst, some context: while most of attention has focused on the White House’s hamfisted attempt to gather dirt on the Biden family and its apparently widespread (and illegal) misuse of classification to hide politically damaging and legally incriminating information, there is also another sideplot: his conspiracy theory that Clinton’s missing emails, and perhaps other nefarious things, are somehow being stored on Ukrainian servers. Physically obtaining the servers would provide no new information.One of the more bizarre elements of Donald Trump’s self-inflicted Ukraine scandal is his seemingly genuine belief that some nefarious Democratic scheme is hidden on Ukrainian computers. The FBI received a digital image of the servers - a complete record of what was on the unwieldy farm of physical computers.Court documents show that the DNC decommissioned well over 100. With modern computing, what people experience as a single server is actually dozens of different systems. There is no single server to hide in Ukraine.The CEO and co-founder of CrowdStrike, George Kurtz, was born in New Jersey.which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian, and I still want to see that server." "The FBI went in and they told them get out of here, we’re not giving it to you. "A lot of it had to do, they say, with Ukraine," Trump said.Trump brought up the conspiracy theory in his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and repeated the claim in an interview on "Fox and Friends" last week."This is the public conclusion of our intelligence agencies, confirmed in bipartisan congressional reports."īetween the lines: Some Republicans have offered the Ukraine interference conspiracy as a justification for the Trump administration's decision to freeze military aid until Ukraine carried out an investigation into the 2016 election - an allegation now at the heart of the impeachment inquiry. "The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016," Hill said.Why it matters: Kennedy's comments come after former National Security Council official Fiona Hill publicly testified in an impeachment hearing last week that the conspiracy is "a fictional narrative that is being perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves." I'm not saying that I know one way or the other." Nor do any of us." WALLACE "Let me just interrupt to say that the entire intelligence community says it was Russia." KENNEDY: "Right, but it could also be Ukraine. Was it Russia or Ukraine?" KENNEDY: "I don't know. The exchange: CHRIS WALLACE: "Senator Kennedy, who do you believe was responsible for hacking the DNC and Clinton campaign computers - their emails.