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Credit to Author: Brian Barrett| Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2019 20:28:44 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n Even secretary of state Mike Pompeo has given credence to Trump's demonstrably wrong theory that Ukraine hacked the DNC.<\/p>\n Look, we\u2019ve written this before<\/a>. So have a bunch<\/a> of other<\/a> outlets, for weeks on end, including today<\/a>. Even Fox and Friends<\/em> raised<\/a> an eyebrow at the idea. But since Donald Trump persists, along with, now, his secretary of state, who should and one suspects does know better, we will write it once again: Ukraine does not have a DNC server. Give no quarter to any suggestion otherwise.<\/p>\n Where does this malignant conspiracy theory come from in the first place? Maybe Paul Manafort<\/a>. Probably 4chan<\/a>. Regardless, it has since stuck in the president\u2019s brain like a Ceti eel placed by a wrathful Khan, burrowing deeper until it consumes whatever remains of rational thought. The story, as Trump recently posited on a marathon call-in to Fox and Friends<\/em>, goes something like this:<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of it had to do, they say, with Ukraine,\u201d Trump said. \u201cIt\u2019s very interesting. They have the server, right? From the DNC, Democratic National Committee. The FBI went in, and they told them, 'Get out of here, we\u2019re not giving it to you.' They gave the server to CrowdStrike, or whatever it\u2019s called, which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian, and I still want to see that server. You know, the FBI has never gotten that server. That\u2019s a big part of this whole thing. Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?\u201d<\/p>\n The conspiracy appears to have metastasized.<\/p>\n A light edit for coherence: Trump believes\u2014and by all indications this is true belief, not posturing<\/a>\u2014that after the Democratic National Committee was hacked in 2016, the DNC gave a physical server to Ukrainian cybersecurity company CrowdStrike and refused to let the FBI see the evidence. Trump further argues that the server in question now physically resides in Ukraine. Inside that server, Trump suggests, one would find evidence<\/a>, gleaming like a Pulp Fiction<\/em> briefcase, that Ukraine, not Russia, hacked the DNC in 2016.<\/p>\n \u201cAre you sure they did that?\u201d asked Fox and Friends<\/em> host Steve Doocey.<\/p>\n To which Trump replied: \u201cWell, that\u2019s what the word is.\u201d<\/p>\n Almost every aspect of this is demonstrably wrong. CrowdStrike is not a Ukrainian company. Its cofounder and chief technology officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, was born in Russia and has lived in the US since his teenage years. The company is based in Sunnyvale, California, and went public this summer. As is standard in this sort of incident response, CrowdStrike never took physical possession of any DNC server. Its analysts instead captured an \u201cimage\u201d of the hard drives and memories of affected machines, exact replicas that it could examine for signs of malfeasance. It handed all of that forensic evidence over to the FBI, which Department of Justice deputy assistant attorney general Adam Hickey confirmed<\/a> just last month. And if the logical contortions required to view CrowdStrike as somehow partisan in all of this aren\u2019t already enough, know that the company counts the Republican National Congressional Committee among its clients<\/a>.<\/p>\n So: Not Ukrainian. No physical server. Not only was the FBI directly involved, but the DOJ indicted the Russian hackers responsible and laid out in exquisite detail how they did it\u2014and how CrowdStrike fought them off. You can read the indictment for yourself here. Start on page 10; CrowdStrike is Company 1.<\/p>\n