Trump Links To Crowdstrike Exposed: Why Ex-Prez Spoke to Ukraine About Russia-Probing Company Behind Global Computing Outage
July 19 2024, Published 3:46 p.m. ET
Former president Donald Trump has a surprising history with the Texas-based cybersecurity giant behind the massive global tech outage.
A faulty software update pushed out by CrowdStrike on Friday wreaked havoc around the world, disrupting business operations at airlines, banks, and even hospitals using computers running Microsoft Windows.
But this isn't the first time that the firm has made headlines for controversial reasons, RadarOnline.com can reveal.
Before this week's catastrophic blunder, CrowdStrike was best known for its role in the investigation into the Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee in the lead-up to the 2016 election where Trump triumphed over Hillary Clinton.
CrowdStrike, hired by the DNC to provide cybersecurity, was the first to sound the alarm about Russian interference in the election that led to Trump's ascension to the White House, determining that Russian agents had broken into the network and stolen emails.
Although US intelligence agencies, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, agreed with CrowdStrike's analysis that Russia was behind the cyberattacks, far-right websites and Russia media outlets claimed that the Ukrainian government had used the company to hack the DNC and frame Russia in an attempt to discredit Trump's victory.
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When he was president, Trump asked Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to look into the conspiracy theory in a now-infamous 2019 phone call that led to his first impeachment.
According to a declassified transcript of the conversation released by the White House later that year, Trump said: “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.”
“I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.”
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Conspiracy theorists believed that CrowdStrike was owned by a wealthy Ukrainian, although its co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, is actually a Russian-born U.S. citizen who immigrated as a child.
In 2019, the company stated: “With regards to our investigation of the DNC hack in 2016, we provided all forensic evidence and analysis to the FBI. As we’ve stated before, we stand by our findings and conclusions that have been fully supported by the US Intelligence community.”
Several months later, they clarified: “CrowdStrike is non-partisan – we routinely work with both Republican and Democratic organizations to protect them from cyber-attacks – along with thousands of other organizations around the world of all industries and sizes.”