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</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The Truth About Trump’s Insane Ukraine ‘Server’ Conspiracy</b></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump asked Ukraine’s president to help prove a bonkers, Russia-friendly conspiracy theory that U.S. intel relied on manufactured evidence to blame the 2016 DNC hack on Moscow.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kevin Poulsen</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sr. National Security Correspondent</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Updated 10.16.19 12:47PM ET / Published<b> 09.25.19</b> </font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Update: President Donald Trump on Wednesday once again promoted the baseless idea that a Democratic National Commitee server that was hacked in 2016 is being held in Ukraine. Below is a story The Daily Beast published last month about this conspiracy theory amid revelations that Trump asked the president of Ukraine to investigate it.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donald Trump asked for more than a criminal investigation of his political opponent’s son in his call with Ukraine’s president. Trump also sought help in reviving a long-ago debunked conspiracy theory that challenges the basic underpinnings of the U.S. intelligence community’s findings on Russia’s 2016 election interference, in a bizarre spectacle that sees an American president trying to conscript a foreign leader into undermining his own intelligence agencies.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike,” Trump said, according to a compilation of notes on the call released by the White House. “I guess you have one of your wealthy people. The server, they say Ukraine has it.”</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">To those not versed in fringe-right canon, it’s a curious thing to say. “It almost sounds like he was babbling to the president of Ukraine,” said Robert Johnston, CEO of Adlumin, who led the DNC breach investigation while at Crowdstrike. “I imagine it would have confused the Ukranian president. Like, ‘What are you talking about?’”</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Conservative websites are spinning the odd exchange as a reference to a Justice Department investigation ordered by William Barr into the origins of the Mueller probe. “It is unclear specifically what Trump was referring to with<b> Crowdstrike,” reads one article in this vein on The Federalist. In truth, it’s actually quite clear. Trump is referencing a conspiracy theory pushed by Russian trolls and far-right pundits that imagines the Democratic National Committee fabricating all the evidence in Russia’s 2016 breach of the DNC network. </b></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Trump has shown a pronounced preference for the pretend version of events.”</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>The hoax has its roots in a GRU persona, “Guccifer 2.0,” created to cast doubt on Russia’s culpability in the DNC hack. Today it’s buttressed by deceptive blog posts, memes, and putative forensic analysis of metadata in documents leaked from the DNC and John Podesta intrusions, and has spun out several related theories and offshoots, including the Seth Rich hoax that blames the hack on a slain DNC staffer with previously-unknown hacking skills.</b></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Crowdstrike enters the picture because it’s the security firm the DNC hired to investigate the breach back in 2016, and the first of many to identify Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, as the perpetrator</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. A publicly-traded company headquartered in California, Crowdstrike has nothing to do with Ukraine, except in conspiracyland, which pretends that <b>Crowdstrike co-founder</b></span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);"><b> Dmitri Alperovitch</b> is Ukrainian</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">, and that <b>he framed Russia for election interference both on the DNC’s orders and to punish Putin for invading his homeland.</b></span></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In real life, Alperovitch is an American citizen born in Russia who escaped to the U.S. with his family during the Soviet era. But Trump has shown a pronounced preference for the pretend version. </b></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Why wouldn’t Podesta and Hillary Clinton allow the FBI to see the server?” Trump asked the AP in 2017. “They brought in another company that I hear is Ukrainian-based… I heard it’s owned by a very rich Ukrainian, that’s what I heard.”</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The “server” in the conspiracy is the hacked DNC server that the Democrats, the claim goes, won’t let the FBI examine because it would expose their elaborate plot. “What is the server saying?” Trump asked in one tweet last year. </font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">That part’s made up, too. The DNC turned down one unusual FBI request early in the hack investigation. The bureau wanted access to the DNC’s network while the Russians were still in it, most likely to stage a counter operation against the GRU. <b>The DNC declined, perhaps reluctant to have two intelligence agencies playing capture-the-flag in their systems five months before a presidential election. </b>The DNC later authorized Crowdstrike to share full copies of the hacked servers with the bureau, giving the FBI access to the same evidence Crowdstrike had. </font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“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 Wednesday. “As we’ve stated before, we stand by our findings and conclusions that have been fully supported by the US Intelligence community.”</b></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[ALL GRU’D UP</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">‘Lone DNC Hacker’ Revealed as Russian Intelligence Officer</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kevin Poulsen, </font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Spencer Ackerman</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">RELATED IN TECH</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"An engineer from the Israeli company \"Commun.it\" uses his expertise in social media commercial analysis to identify networks of fake users during at the group's office in the Israeli city of Bnei Brak near Tel Aviv on January 23, 2019. -<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> A coalition of Israeli diplomats, programmers and hackers have joined forces to stave off threats -- including from hostile states -- by identifying networks on social media and getting them removed.</span> ( (</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Russian Unit That Went Dark After DNC Hack Is Still Spying</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>RealClearPolitics Has a Secret Site to Push Far-Right Memes</b></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Why Trump’s Tweets Aren’t Going Anywhere]</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In truth, Crowdstrike’s findings were never controversial among security experts, and they were later confirmed by FBI agents with access to the same evidence, as well as additional evidence Crowdstrike never had. In October 2018, Robert Mueller indicted 12 GRU officers for the DNC intrusion and hacks targeting John Podesta and the DCCC.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Today the secret server hoax is mostly confined to the very edge of the conservative fringe, though it’s made an appearance in court. Indicted former Trump campaign advisor Roger Stone has been using the theory to try and get evidence against him thrown out of court, even filing an affidavit written by William Binney, one of the conspiracy theory’s most dogged advocates. Last week the federal judge overseeing Stone’s obstruction of justice case rejected his motion without ruling on the conspiracy theory itself.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kevin Poulsen</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sr. National Security Correspondent</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">@kpoulsen</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kevin.Poulsen@thedailybeast.com</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here.</font></div></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">an 919</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Who fed Donald Trump his bogus Ukraine conspiracy theories?</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by David Atkins / Washington Monthly September 30, 2019</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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. And one of the most important questions we should be asking is where he got that information.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">First, 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<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> another sideplot: his conspiracy theory that Clinton’s missing emails, and perhaps other nefarious things, are somehow being stored on Ukrainian servers. 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. </span>Rachel Sandler breaks it down at Forbes thus:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Silicon Valley-based CrowdStrike was hired in 2016 by the DNC to investigate the origins of the hack. The company didn’t give the DNC’s physical server to the FBI, which has been seized on by conspiracy theorists as evidence of a cover up.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">According to the theory, which has been prominent on right-wing blogs and news websites and repeated by Trump and former campaign consultant<b> Roger Stone,</b> Democrats and CrowdStrike concocted evidence to frame Russia for the hack in order to discredit Trump’s win in 2016.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The supposed evidence of Russia’s innocence relies on the belief that a DNC server has been hidden in Ukraine, possibly by CrowdStrike’s cofounder Dmitri Alperovitch.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">That belief may stem from a statement by President Trump in a 2017 interview with the Associated Press, in which he questioned why the FBI didn’t look at the DNC server, that CrowdStrike is owned by “a very rich Ukrainian.” <b>Alperovitch is actually a Russian-born American citizen.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The theory is, of course, totally bogus. It’s also an attempt to absolve Russia of its culpability in the hacking of the DNC:</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Ultimately, the president seems to be alluding to an idea that alt-right commentators and pro-Russia sympathizers have pushed for years: that CrowdStrike was wrong about Russia hacking the DNC—and, moreover, that CrowdStrike intentionally blamed Russia for political reasons. CrowdStrike’s findings have, of course, been repeatedly affirmed by the intelligence community, the Justice Department, members of Congress, and the office of Robert Mueller. Last year the government indicted a dozen Russian intelligence officers for their role in the hacking plot…</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>These straw-grasping claims and distortions of fact are fuel for the fire of disinformation.</b> Further, the notion that there is some missing “server,” and that the server might exist somewhere—like in Ukraine—has no basis in reality. The DNC’s network consisted of many servers and computers which either had be put out to pasture, rebooted, or rebuilt to rid them of malware and intruders. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As the DNC explained in a 2018 lawsuit filed against the Russian government, it had to “decommission more than 140 servers, remove and reinstall all software, including the operating systems, for more than 180 computers, and rebuild at least 11 servers” as a result of the hacking.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The unanswered question in all this is how Donald Trump came to believe in this nonsense, and why he continues to believe it. His own employees and administration official tried again and again to disabuse him of these notions, but he refused to give them up:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">President Trump was repeatedly warned by his own staff that the Ukraine conspiracy theory that he and his lawyer were pursuing was “completely debunked” long before the president pressed Ukraine this summer to investigate his Democratic rivals, a former top adviser said on Sunday.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Thomas P. Bossert, who served as Mr. Trump’s first homeland security adviser, said he told the president there was no basis to the theory that Ukraine, not Russia, intervened in the 2016 election</b> and did so on behalf of the Democrats. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Bossert said he was “deeply disturbed” that Mr. Trump nonetheless tried to get Ukraine’s president to produce damaging information about Democrats.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Rudy Giuliani has been significantly involved in the obsession over Ukraine, as his bizarre spiels on cable news networks have amply demonstrated. </b>Most recently he claimed to have been attempting to prove that Donald Trump (and, by extension, the Russians) was “framed by the Democrats”–a notion that Trump recently promoted on twitter.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But it seems unlikely Giuliani has been Donald Trump’s primary conspiracy theory conduit. Rather, he seems to have been roped into it by Trump, and enjoys the cable news limelight.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One might think that Trump got the information from random corners of the internet. But the problem there is that the president barely knows how to use a computer, and has to have articles printed out for him and put on his desk.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So who was feeding him these conspiracies? Why did he continue to believe them even as his own intelligence services and White House staff were attempting to disabuse him of them?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We still don’t know. But we deserve to find out.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">David Atkins is a writer, activist and research professional living in Santa Barbara. He is a contributor to the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal and president of The Pollux Group, a qualitative research firm.</font></div></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/us/politics/trump-ukraine-conspiracy.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/us/politics/trump-ukraine-conspiracy.html</font></a></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>How a Fringe Theory About Ukraine Took Root in the White House</b></font></div><div>
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">President Trump has promoted a false conspiracy theory involving Democrats, an obscure security firm and the 2016 election — including on a call with the Ukrainian president that has led to an impeachment inquiry.</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">/The New York Times</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Scott Shane</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Oct. 3, 2019</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In an April 2017 interview with The Associated Press, President Trump suddenly began talking about the hack of the Democratic National Committee a year earlier, complaining that the F.B.I. had not physically examined the compromised server.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“They brought in another company that I hear is Ukrainian-based,” the president said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“CrowdStrike?” the surprised reporter asked, referring to the California cybersecurity company that investigated how Russian government hackers had stolen and leaked Democratic emails, disrupting Hillary Clinton’s campaign.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“That’s what I heard,” Mr. Trump resumed. “I heard it’s owned by a very rich Ukrainian; that’s what I heard.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>More than two years later, Mr. Trump was still holding on to this false conspiracy theory. In his July call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, he summed it up in a sort of shorthand </b>— at least according to the White House memorandum, labeled “not a verbatim transcript.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“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 president said. It is unclear whether the ellipses indicate that words were omitted or that Mr. Trump’s voice was trailing off.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Then he added one novel detail: “The server, they say Ukraine has it.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Now, Mr. Trump’s call for Ukraine to look into his CrowdStrike story forms the background to the House impeachment inquiry, which is focused on the second request he made: that Mr. Zelensky investigate Mr. Trump’s possible 2020 opponent, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Mr. Trump has placed a concoction of disprovable claims, of the kind usually found on the fringes of the web, squarely in the middle of American politics and diplomacy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The tale of the supposedly hidden server may have appealed to Mr. Trump because it undercut a well-established fact that he has resented and resisted for three years: The Russian government interfered in the 2016 election to help him win, an effort thoroughly documented by American intelligence agencies and amply supported by public evidence.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">By contrast, there is no evidence to support the president’s vague suggestion that Ukraine, not Russia, might be responsible for the hacking, or that CrowdStrike somehow connived in it. But his alternate history has provided a psychological shield for the president against facts that he believes tarnish his electoral victory.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Mr. Trump has long called for better relations with Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia and brushed aside complaints about its conduct. So there is a certain symmetry to his suggestion that Ukraine, Russia’s opponent and the victim of its territorial grab, may somehow have framed Russia for the 2016 election activity.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Ukraine is the perfect scapegoat for him, because it’s the enemy of Russia,” said Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington who regularly visits Ukraine and is writing a book called “How to Lose the Information War.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>She noted that a number of Ukraine-linked stories, some of them distorted or exaggerated, have been pulled together by Mr. Trump’s supporters into a single narrative.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>For example, there is the idea, promoted by the president’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, that Ukraine’s government actively sabotaged Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> A Ukrainian-American lawyer who consulted for the D.N.C. looked into the finances of <b>Paul Manafort</b> and spoke with Ukrainian embassy officials. But there appears to have been no organized Ukrainian government effort to intervene — certainly nothing comparable to the activities of Russian intelligence agencies ordered by Mr. Putin.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It is true that a Ukrainian legislator helped publicize documents on Mr. Manafort’s multimillion-dollar payments from a Ukrainian political party, leading to his resignation as Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman. But the claim of Mr. Manafort’s wrongdoing turned out to be justified. He is now serving seven and a half years in prison for financial fraud and other crimes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In May, Mr. Trump recalled the American ambassador to Kiev, Marie L. Yovanovitch, appointed by President Barack Obama in 2016, telling others she was scheming against his administration. She has denied it.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">And Mr. Trump has repeatedly charged that Mr. Biden, who handled Ukrainian affairs as vice president, tried to get a prosecutor fired for investigating a Ukrainian energy company that paid his son, Hunter, handsomely as a board member despite a lack of experience in Ukraine. In fact, multiple countries were pressing for the firing of the prosecutor, who they thought was turning a blind eye to corruption.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Now it seems like all of these conspiracy theories are merging into one,” Ms. Jankowicz said. She studies disinformation, she said, but Mr. Trump produced one claim she’d never come across.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“I do this for a living, and I’d never heard anyone say the servers were in Ukraine,” she said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Twitter removed a video posted by Mr. Trump that showed a meme of Nickelbacker’s lead singer, edited as an attack on Joe Biden.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In the 27 months between Mr. Trump’s two citations of the CrowdStrike-Ukraine conspiracy theory,<b> it has survived despite many denials from CrowdStrike, the F.B.I. and people directly involved in the investigations. It has survived despite the fact that the 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 </b>(and a photo of the two artifacts ran on The Times’s front page). It has survived despite the indictment prepared last year by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, laying out in extraordinary detail the actions of 12 named Russian military intelligence officers who hacked the D.N.C. and other election targets.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>The speculation springs from what Mr. Trump has called a “big Dem scam” </b>— the false notion that the F.B.I. never really investigated the D.N.C. hack. In fact, according to people directly involved, CrowdStrike was in regular contact with the bureau in spring 2016 as it examined dozens of servers used by both the D.N.C. and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">It is true, as Mr. Trump has often tweeted, that F.B.I. agents never took physical possession of the Democrats’ servers. But CrowdStrike supplied the F.B.I. with digital copies of the servers so that the bureau could assess the Russian malware infecting them. The Mueller investigation later confirmed CrowdStrike’s findings.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Still, the president has clung to the theory linking CrowdStrike, Ukraine and the D.N.C. servers despite the repeated efforts of his aides to dissuade him, Thomas Bossert, his former homeland security adviser, said on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “The D.N.C. server and that conspiracy theory has got to go,” he said. “If he continues to focus on that white whale, it’s going to bring him down.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>To go in search of the roots of Mr. Trump’s CrowdStrike-Ukraine conspiracy theory is to travel the internet’s most peculiar provinces and the darkest threads</b> on Twitter and Facebook. On 4chan and pro-Trump spaces on Reddit, on websites like<b> ZeroHedge.com and Washington’s Blog,</b> you can find plenty of speculation about evil manipulation by CrowdStrike and secret maneuvers by Ukrainians — often inflamed by Mr. Trump’s own statements.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Until the president’s statements, however, even internet speculation did not attribute CrowdStrike’s ownership to a rich Ukrainian or suggest that the D.N.C. servers were hidden in Ukraine.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">George Eliason, an American journalist who lives in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists fought Ukrainian forces, has written extensively about what he considers to be a “coup attempt” against President Trump involving American and Ukrainian intelligence agencies and CrowdStrike. He said he did not know if his writings for obscure websites might have influenced the president.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“CrowdStrike and Ukrainian Intel are working hand in glove,” he wrote in an email. “Is Ukrainian Intelligence trying to invent a reason for the U.S. to take a hardline stance against Russia? Are they using CrowdStrike to carry this out?”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Mr. Eliason and other purveyors of Ukraine conspiracies often point to the Atlantic Council, a research group in Washington, as the locus of the schemes.</b> The Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk has made donations to the council and serves on its international advisory board; Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike’s co-founder, who was born in Russia and came to the United States as a child, is an Atlantic Council senior fellow.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>That connection seems slender, but it may be the origin of Mr. Trump’s association of a wealthy Ukrainian with CrowdStrike.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Pro-Trump media leaped last week to defend the president’s Ukraine theories. Rush Limbaugh said on his radio show that Mr. Trump’s “reference to CrowdStrike, mark my words, is momentous,” though he did not say why.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">And Russian state news outlets are always ready to cheer on Mr. Trump’s efforts to point the blame for the 2016 hack away from Moscow. On Sept. 25, after the White House released its memo on the Zelensky call,<b> Russia’s Sputnik news website ran a story supporting Mr. Trump’s remarks.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The Sputnik article cited Mr. Eliason’s writings </b>and suggested that CrowdStrike might have framed Russia for the D.N.C. hack — if it occurred at all. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">It quoted a Twitter account called “The Last Refuge” declaring: “The D.N.C. servers were never hacked.”</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">All this mythmaking about the 2016 hack frustrates Robert Johnston, who was the lead investigator for CrowdStrike on the D.N.C. inquiry. Mr. Johnston, a former Marine and Cyber Command operator, said he could make no sense of Mr. Trump’s assertions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“It doesn’t connect with anything in my experience,” he said. “I’d be interested in the president of Ukraine’s impression.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Johnston, now chief executive of the cybersecurity company Adlumin, said he was weary of the conspiracies surrounding what he considered a straightforward conclusion. Having seen the digital fingerprints of Russian intelligence in earlier hacking cases, he felt there was little doubt about the identity of the perpetrators.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“I don’t know how you get to this point,” Mr. Johnston said of the fantasies Mr. Trump has promoted. “This is a story that just won’t die.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: How Tale of Sabotage Took Root in Oval Office.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/us/politics/trump-ukraine-conspiracy.html</font></div></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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