Debunking Crowdstrike

Okay, so we’ve seen the Ukranian pressure at the core of the impeachment inquiry. Here’s a link to the partial transcript of the call in question, from a fairly pro-Trump source, Fox News.

In the transcript, the President says, “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. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. 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.”

So, you have “Crowdstrike” and “The server”. What is Crowdstrike, and what is that server?

Well, Crowdstrike is the name of a cybersecurity firm, a fairly prominent one that’s been around since 2011. They’re the ones who got the contract to analyze the DNC servers to find where the security breach happened during the 2016 election.

You’ll notice that there’s an “s” at the end of the word server. That’s because the DNC, like many other companies, uses cloud-based storage that scatters their information across an array of servers… more than a hundred, in this case. It provides extra layers of protection against physical damage and security breaches.

Crowdstrike performed an analysis which pointed directly to a Russian effort to breach security. They weren’t the only ones. American intelligence services, performing independent reviews of the event, determined conclusively that Russian efforts were behind the attack. Moreover, the sources behind the attack and the resultant dissemination of information were the same sources found to be behind the promulgation of divisive ads on social media in both the US and EU, and many pro-Brexit efforts… all of which had also been traced to the Russians.

The Russians, unfortunately for Trump, are widely seen as America’s enemies, or under the most kind of interpretations, antagonists. To have them responsible for aiding President Trump’s election damages his narrative of being pro-American. To this end, an alternate theory has grown.

It goes like this: The DNC got together with Crowdstrike to manufacture evidence showing that the security breach was from Russia, even though they leaked it themselves to undermine Trump. Then they killed two Democrat staffers, Seth Rich and Shawn Lucas (whose overdose on Fentanyl was secretly an assassination), to keep the truth from getting out. Then they sent the actual server that kept the real data over to Ukraine, to keep it safe.

Remember what I said earlier about cloud-based server systems? That is the first problem with this theory. Then there are the problems associated with the Seth Rich murder theory, which have been chronicled previously. Then there are the indictments of the Russian agents responsible for the breach which occurred during the Mueller probe… a probe which, at the time, was being promoted by QAnon theorists as secretly being in league with Donald Trump and designed to expose Hillary Clinton’s criminal wrongdoing associated with child sex trafficking. And there is the question of whether multiple Federal investigators with access to far more information than Cloudstrike had available would be credibly duped by falsified information from one of their sources; rationally, it would be likely that any significant discrepancy would be noted and separately investigated.

Despite these obvious and dramatic demonstrations of irrationality, it is evident from the context of the call transcript that President Trump believes in the theory.