In 2016, the Democratic National Committee hired CrowdStrike, which is based in Sunnyvale, California, to investigate a breach into their servers. Here’s how CrowdStrike bubbled up from the online sludge and into the mouth of the American president - and may become part of the impeachment investigations. “As we’ve stated before, we stand by our findings and conclusions that have been fully supported by the US Intelligence community.”įor Trump’s online fanbase, for CrowdStrike to make its way into the president’s conversation with a foreign leader - and to be subject of mainstream news articles (like the one you’re reading right now) - is vindication of a yearslong conspiracy theory. In a statement provided to BuzzFeed News, a CrowdStrike spokesperson pushed back at conspiracy theories about CrowdStrike’s work with the DNC in 2016.“We provided all forensic evidence and analysis to the FBI,” the CrowdStrike spokesperson said. It was then laundered into mainstream Republican discourse by figures like Roger Stone, Trump's former campaign adviser. The flames were fanned by Russian news outlets like Russia Today and Sputnik News, who both published multiple pieces about it. One large 4chan thread was titled “HAPPENING: CROWDSTRIKE SERVER RELEASE IMMINENT,” another, “What is CrowdStrike, and why does their server seem to be important?” and another, “ULTIMATE HAPPENING: Trump mentions CROWDSTRIKE in Transcript release, Tied to DNC server & Seth Rich.”ĬrowdStrike's role in a sprawling conspiracy carried out by the DNC started as wild conjecture on anonymous message boards in the lead up to the 2016 election. In the memorandum, Trump says to Zelensky, “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.” It wasn’t the possible abuse of power that sent them into a fervor, but instead the American president’s mention of CrowdStrike, a company that provides security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services, and which the Democratic National Committee hired to investigate the hack of its servers during the 2016 election campaign.

According to the document, Trump asked Zelensky to do him a “favor” and investigate the origins of the Russia probe as well as former vice president Joe Biden.Īs the country’s mainstream media swarmed over the staff-written memorandum of the conversation, anonymous radicalized communities like 4chan and far-right pockets of Facebook, Reddit, and Telegram focused on something else.

The White House released the record of a call between President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday.

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