Blog No. 239. What the Heck Is CrowdStrike?

In his notorious telephone call with Ukraine’s President Zelensky on July 25, President Trump asked “a favor” of Zelensky:

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. 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. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you 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. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.

CrowdStrike? A server that Ukraine has? What on earth was that all about? It was about a weird theory that has been bruited about in the right-wing media that Trump finds more reliable than the American intelligence community. According to that theory, it was not Russia but CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm owned by a wealthy Ukrainian, that hacked the DNC computers in 2016. A key element of the CrowdStrike theory is that, after the hacking, the DNC’s server was spirited off to Ukraine. Nothing in the theory has any basis in fact, and it is,  as Jonah Goldberg aptly put it in National Review, simply “bonkers.”

CrowdStrike is a highly regarded American cybersecurity firm co-founded, not by a Ukrainian, but by a Russian-born American citizen, Dmitri Alperovitch, who is a well-known cybersecurity expert. CrowdStrike was retained by the DNC in 2016 to investigate the hacking of their computers. There was not just one DNC server, but 140 of them and while the FBI did not take physical custody of the servers, Crowd Strike provided the FBI with digital copies of their entire output. As a result of the 2016 hacking, the DNC ultimately had to decommission more than 140 servers, wipe and reboot 180 computers, and rebuild 11 servers. There is no evidence that any servers ever went missing or mysteriously migrated to Ukraine.

As reported in the New York Times, the DNC even had some fun with the theory:

D.N.C. put one of its hacked servers on display — not in Ukraine but in its Washington offices beside the filing cabinet pried open in 1972 by the Watergate burglars (and a photo of the two artifacts ran on The Times’s front page).

The CrowdStrike theory has been repeatedly debunked, most recently by Trump’s former Homeland Security adviser, Tom Bossert, and by his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. On ABC on September 29, George Stephanopoulos quoted Trump’s CrowdStrike request to Zelensky. When Stephanopoulos described CrowdStrike as a debunked conspiracy theory and asked for Bossert’s reaction, Bossert was explicit and emphatic:

It’s not only a conspiracy theory, it is completely debunked. You know, I — I don’t want to be glib about this matter, but last year retired former senator Judd Gregg wrote a piece in The Hill Magazine, saying the three ways or the five ways to impeach oneself. And the third way was to hire Rudy Giuliani. And at this point I am deeply frustrated with what he and the legal team is doing and repeating that debunked theory to the president. It sticks in his mind when he hears it over and over again.

And for clarity here, George, let me just again repeat that it has no validity. United States government reached its conclusion on attributing to Russia the DNC hack in 2016 before it even communicated it to the FBI, long before the FBI ever knocked on the door at the DNC. So a server inside the DNC was not relevant to our determination to the attribution.

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The DNC server and that conspiracy theory has got to go. They have to stop with that, it cannot continue to be repeated in our — in our discourse.

It may be noted that Bossert has not become a NeverTrumper. He loyally claimed not only that there had been no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, but that a quid pro quo in the Trump-Zelensky call was “far from proven.” Hence, his observations on CrowdStrike should have been even harder for the Trumpers to dismiss or ignore.

Moreover, Rudy Giuliani, speaking on the same program, also took pains to distance himself from the CrowdStrike theory and, contrary to Bossert, insisted that he had never pushed it:

I have never peddled it. Have you ever hear me talk about Crowdstrike? I’ve never peddled it. Tom Bossert doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I have never engaged in any theory that the Ukrainians did the hacking. In fact, when this was first presented to me, I pretty clearly understood the Ukrainians didn’t do the hacking….I agree with Bossert on one thing, it’s clear: there’s no evidence the Ukrainians did it. I never pursued any evidence and he’s created a red herring.

Giuliani went on to refer vaguely to other supposed collusion involving Hillary Clinton, the DNC, unnamed Ukrainians and George Soros. He spoke, however, in terms so lacking in specificity and coherence that they do not merit comment. The one point that emerged from Giuliani’s entire interview with clarity is that the CrowdStrike theory should be considered dead and buried. But, no. With a nod to approaching Halloween, it may be said that it is hard to put a stake through the heart of this particular zombie.

Less than three weeks later, at a brain-rattling news conference on October 17, Acting Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, acknowledged:

Mick Mulvaney: (21:09)
Did he also mention to me in the past, the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely. No question about that. But that’s it. And that’s why we held up the money.

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Reporter (M): (22:25)
But to be clear, what you just described is a quid pro quo. It is funding will not flow unless the investigation into into the Democratic server happened as well.

Mick Mulvaney: (22:35)     

We do that all the time with foreign policy.

The assembled media representatives were sufficiently stunned by Mulvaney’s admission of a quid pro quo that no one thought to ask him to explain what he—or Trump—meant by an investigation into the Democratic server or their reason for believing that an investigation was called for. Needless to say, even after the small firestorm created by Mulvaney’s remark’s, the White House has attempted no explanation.

Withholding military aid in order to obtain dirt on a political rival is disgraceful. Withholding military aid to demand investigation of a loony and debunked theory is deeply troubling on its own. Combining the two beggars the imagination, but that’s our president.