


The presiding judge has denied Stone's efforts to challenge the investigation into the hack.ĬrowdStrike has also worked for the GOP. He has claimed that CrowdStrike is concealing evidence that could presumably clear Russia of culpability.
Dnc server ukraine conspiracy theory trial#
Stone is now standing trial for allegedly lying to Congress, obstructing justice and witness tampering after getting swept up in the Mueller probe. Some propagated by Russian media and online included mention of a supposed "hidden DNC server," which acolytes of the Republican political operative Roger Stone picked up and circulated. Unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about a purported Ukrainian link to the DNC hack began circulating almost immediately after it was discovered. Ukraine and Russia have essentially been at war since Russia's 2014 military intervention and annexation of Crimea. In the call, Trump mentioned Mueller's "incompetent performance" and said "they say it started with Ukraine." Congress the day before Trump's phone call with Zelenskiy. Its findings were confirmed by FBI investigators, with whom it later shared the forensic evidence.īased on those findings, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 members of Russia's military intelligence agency and later concluded that their operation sought to favor Trump’s candidacy. The server, they say Ukraine has it." Trump added that he'd like to have Attorney General William Barr call "you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it."ĬrowdStrike determined in June 2016 that Russian agents had broken into the committee's network and stolen emails that were subsequently published by WikiLeaks.

I guess you have one of your wealthy people.

"I would like to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike. According to a reconstructed transcript of the call released by the White House, which is not a verbatim account, he said: Here’s how the call brought the debunked theory back into currency.ĭuring that July call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Trump made a brief and cryptic reference to CrowdStrike. Kent said Wednesday that he hadn’t even heard of the theory until a whistleblower alerted the public to a July 25 call between Trump and the Ukrainian president. One key figure in this supposed conspiracy: CrowdStrike, a security firm hired by the DNC that detected and analyzed the hack five months before the 2016 election. In the weeks after the exchange between the two leaders, Sondland testified that he had continued pressuring Ukrainian officials to publicly announce the probes Trump had demanded, one of which he repeatedly described as an investigation of “the DNC server.In broad outline, the theory contends, without evidence, that the 2016 hacking of the Democratic National Committee was a setup somehow perpetrated with Ukrainian complicity in which computer records were fabricated to cast blame on Russia. Ambassador Gordon Sondland made clear last week, the references to CrowdStrike and the server were not limited to a single call. None were prepared to acknowledge, let alone justify, the actual investigation Trump had requested: an inquiry into CrowdStrike and the supposedly missing DNC email server. In the course of House impeachment hearings, GOP legislators have sought to justify Trump’s desire to investigate putative “election interference” by Ukraine - citing such “interventions” as a 2016 newspaper op-ed written by Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States that criticized some of Trump’s foreign policy statements. Even Trump’s staunchest allies in Congress have been unwilling to follow their leader down this rabbit hole.
