President Trump on Friday repeated his debunked claim that Ukraine is connected to a hacked Democratic server from the 2016 election, the same assertion that he raised on his call with the Ukrainian president at the heart of an impeachment inquiry.
Trump made the claim a day after a former White House official with expertise on Russia, Fiona Hill, chastised Republicans for giving air in the impeachment hearings to conspiracy theories that Ukraine, and not Russia, was a driver of foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Hill’s statements to the House Intelligence Committee essentially rebuked her former boss, as Trump has repeatedly floated the theory — and did so again on Friday.
“They gave the server to CrowdStrike or whatever it’s called, which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian, and I still want to see that server,” Trump told the hosts of “Fox & Friends.”
“A lot of it had to do, they say, with Ukraine,” he said. “Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?”
“Are you sure they did that?” co-host Steve Doocey asked.
“That’s what the word is,” Trump responded. “That’s what I asked actually on my phone call, you know. I asked it very point-blank because we’re looking for corruption. There’s tremendous corruption. Why should we be giving hundreds of millions of dollars to countries when there’s this kind of corruption?”
CrowdStrike is a U.S. company that was hired to investigate the hack of Democratic servers. The comments reflect Trump’s insistence on clinging to a conspiracy theory that some of his top advisers have called baseless and that has helped land him in an impeachment inquiry.
Trump’s remarks on Friday were remarkable given the high-profile testimony of Hill, who has authored a book about Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Hill on Thursday asked lawmakers on the Intelligence Committee that in the course of their work they “please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.”
“The fictions are harmful even if they are deployed for purely domestic political purposes,” she testified.
“Based on questions and statements I have heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country — and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did,” Hill said in a statement. “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”
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JUST IN: Trump repeats debunked Ukraine claim day after Fiona Hill chastised GOP for airing conspiracy theory https://t.co/lDDvQ01CPn pic.twitter.com/c4pZyJPlWe
— The Hill (@thehill) November 22, 2019
Crowdstrike is not a Ukrainian company. It's based in California. The DNC did not "give" "the server" to anyone, they had 140 servers, most of which were in the cloud. Crowdstrike imaged those servers and gave the data to the FBI.
None of what the president just said is true. https://t.co/iVXMDrC1NC
— Mike Rothschild (@rothschildmd) November 22, 2019
WaPo and many others have fact-checked this one about 50 times. Still false. And Crowdstrike isn’t even Ukrainian. As Dr. Hill said, this is a conspiracy theory promoted by Russian security services to sow division in the US and obscure Russian election interference. https://t.co/Jnko9jlIro
— Anne Rumsey Gearan (@agearan) November 22, 2019
The company at the heart of the grand conspiracy to get the Republican president is currently being paid for cybersecurity protection by…the Republican Party?https://t.co/De8h2OjUzshttps://t.co/FRekaC4uQJ
— Stephen Hayes (@stephenfhayes) November 22, 2019
The hosts are so visibly uncomfortable. I would say that it’s stunning that he still believes all this nonsense, even now. But it’s not. He was asking Ukraine to prove a total fiction, as a “favor” for vital military aid. https://t.co/Q9F6oF4SKF
— David French (@DavidAFrench) November 22, 2019
Doesn’t matter to Trump and his supporters if the claim is true or not. They will continue to repeat it from now till doomsday. They subscribe to the theory that if you repeat something often enough, it will become true.
Nearly a decade ago, I joined the NYTimes as a cybersecurity reporter. I was leaving my first RSA conference to visit some friends in LA and took the last remaining middle seat on a Southwest flight from SFO-LA. I was seated between two strangers.
— Nicole Perlroth (@nicoleperlroth) November 23, 2019
As we started to descend, I asked them what they were doing in SF. They said they'd just been at the RSA conference to launch their new start-up. They told me it was going to help save the country. I told them I'd also been at a conference and told them my name. They gasped.
— Nicole Perlroth (@nicoleperlroth) November 23, 2019
I'd heard that before. But Barnes was genuine. He meant it. We exchanged contact info and said our goodbyes. Occasionally "Barnesy" would drop me a message out of the blue: "Hey there, middle seat!" He never once pitched me, just wanted to make sure I over my breakup
— Nicole Perlroth (@nicoleperlroth) November 23, 2019
Crowdstrike doesn't need me to defend it. It's a publicly traded American company with a $12B market cap. But just to give you a sense of how absurd Trump's theory is, Kurtz is American and his co-founder @DAlperovitch was born in Moscow. There is no "wealthy Ukrainian."
— Nicole Perlroth (@nicoleperlroth) November 23, 2019
Enough is enough. Every reporter or human with any shred of human dignity needs to shut this one down at every opportunity. When @foxandfriends leaves it at "Are you sure that's true?" you're doing Putin's bidding. The end. PS: This thread is dedicated to Window Seat.
— Nicole Perlroth (@nicoleperlroth) November 23, 2019
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