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Explainer: What is CrowdStrike and what does it have to do with Trump?

From Thr Guardian’s Kari Paul, in San Francisco:

Of the many questions surrounding Donald Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president, there’s one that has people especially puzzled. What is CrowdStrike, and why did Trump bring it up?

On Wednesday, the White House released a partial transcript of the call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in which he asked the Ukrainian president to look into potential 2020 political opponent Joe Biden and his ties to a company in Ukraine. But earlier in the call, Trump begins to ramble about CrowdStrike, a US cybersecurity company.



“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,” Trump said, according to the partial transcript. “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.”



CrowdStrike is mentioned several times in the Mueller Report, as the company was responsible for examining the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s email servers. The forensic work carried out by CrowdStrike ultimately identified Russia as the culprit for this hack and led to indictments of 12 Russian nationals.



Though it is not immediately clear what Trump is talking about in the transcript, he appears to be referencing a persistent right-wing conspiracy theory that the CrowdStrike investigation of the 2016 DNC hack was part of a “deep state” plot to blame Russia for election manipulation.



Conservatives have sought to portray CrowdStrike, which is based in Silicon Valley, as unreliable and part of a conspiracy against Trump. CrowdStrike was founded in 2011 and went public in June 2019 after raising $280m in venture capital.



At the root of this theory is the claim the DNC did not give the FBI “the server” that was hacked, and somehow that server ended up in Ukraine. In reality, there was not one server but more than 140 servers decommissioned by the DNC following the Russia hack. The subsequent investigation concluded it had sufficient information to determine Russian interference.



Still, Trump has tweeted a number of times about the alleged “missing server” since taking office, often mentioning it alongside Hillary Clinton’s “missing emails.”



Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) ....Where is the DNC Server, and why didn’t the FBI take possession of it? Deep State?

People who subscribe to this conspiracy believe CrowdStrike is owned by a Ukrainian national. In 2017, Trump told the Associated Press CrowdStrike is owned by a “very rich Ukrainian”. Officials at CrowdStrike are reportedly very confused about Trump’s references to the company.



“With regards to our investigation of the DNC hack in 2016, we provided all forensic evidence and analysis to the FBI,” Crowdstrike said in a statement on Wednesday. “As we’ve stated before, we stand by our findings and conclusions that have been fully supported by the US intelligence committee.”

