What is behind Trump's obsession with CrowdStrike?
fortune.com
Mike Jones, Worked in technology for over 30 years.
Updated Sep 29
A right wing conspiracy theory. I know, shocking, right?
Let’s look at what the memo (not transcript) from the call with Zelensky has Trump saying:
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. [emphasis mine}
That’s pretty weird. What does it mean?
The theory runs something like this:
“The Russians didn’t hack the DNC’s email server. A DNC staffer, Seth Rich, gave the emails to Julian Assange and was killed on Hillary’s orders when she found out. The DNC called in Crowdstrike, a firm owned by a wealthy Ukranian, to cover up the theft and do a fake report that they were hacked.”
This is, to use a fine old baseball term, horseshit.
There is zero evidence that Rich took emails from the server or that he gave them to Assange.
There is zero evidence that Hillary or anyone else in the DNC had anything to do with his death.
Crowdstrike is owned by Crowdstrike Holdings, Inc., which is based in Sunnyvale, Calif. The company was co-founded by CEO George Kurtz, CTO Dmitri Alperovitch and Gregg Marston (now retired) in 2011. Conspiracists claim Alperovitch is Ukrainian, when in reality he’s an American citizen who was born in Russia. [1]
Trump has made this claim about Crowdstrike multiple times, despite its ownership being public knowledge.
This is one of the more bonkers conspiracy theories floating around on the right, but it keeps getting spread by people like Trump after getting started in the sketchier corners of Reddit and 4chan (which is not to imply that there are non-sketchy corners of 4chan). |
|