By S.T. Patrick
Until President Donald Trump introduced the name “CrowdStrike” into the feisty political discussion of the day, Americans would have been forgiven had they thought it was another bad policy from an overbearing police state. It is not. CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity firm that specializes in protecting large corporations such as Goldman Sachs and Amazon Web Services. It also investigates high-level hacks on large institutions.
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) hired CrowdStrike to trace the source of the 2016 hacks of DNC computers. CrowdStrike then became the first voice to push what was the basis of the Russiagate hoax, that Russian hackers, at the behest of the Russian government, broke into DNC computers and then leaked the contents to the American media in order to guarantee the election of Trump over Hillary Clinton.
In the July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump referenced CrowdStrike. “I would like to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike,” Trump said. “I guess you have one of your wealthy people. The server, they say Ukraine has it.”
Trump believes Russiagate began with CrowdStrike and Ukraine’s willingness to blame Russia for what the DNC believed were the reasons for its loss. Ukraine has been in a hot-and-cold war with Russia since 2014. The argument Trump was making was that there was either a computer server located in the Ukraine or that the contents of the DNC computers were being stored in the Ukraine.
“Why wouldn’t (former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John) Podesta and Hillary Clinton allow the FBI to see the server?” Trump asked in an Associated Press interview in April 2017. “They brought in another company that I hear is Ukrainian-based.” Trump went on to tell the interviewer that he had heard that CrowdStrike was “owned by a very rich Ukrainian,” which it is not. CrowdStrike’s Dmitri Alperovitch is a Russian-born U.S. citizen who came to America as a child and graduated from the University of Georgia. He is not Ukrainian, and he is not “one of (Zelensky’s) wealthy people.” CrowdStrike is based in California.
It is not uncommon for Trump to mishandle details and make wild assumptions. Being a quick thinker with a reflexive personality causes him to blurt out answers, which he then wants investigated (rather than waiting to form answers after an investigation has been completed). However, as per usual, there is a kernel of truth in some of Trump’s most impulsive suspicions.
Perkins Coie was the law firm that represented Clinton and the DNC during the 2016 campaign. It was Perkins Coie that aided in recruiting Crowd- Strike to investigate the hacks into DNC computers. It was also Perkins Coie who paid Fusion GPS to enlist British spy Christopher Steele in the drafting of the now-discredited “Steele dossier.” Perkins Coie, then, knew the angles that the DNC wanted followed, a mythology that would lead to the Russian interference narrative. They knew this when they recruited Steele, and they knew this when they hired CrowdStrike.
Alperovitch, CrowdStrike’s co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO), is a nonresident senior fellow of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council. The Atlantic Council’s view of Russia has been described as “hawkish.” The Atlantic Council is funded by Google Inc., George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Inc., and the State Department. Funding for the Atlantic Council also comes from Burisma, the natural gas company that paid Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, $50,000 a month to serve on its board.
After the hacks into the DNC computers had been made public, the FBI pushed to gain direct access to them in order to conduct a thorough forensic examination. The DNC, incredibly, refused direct access to the FBI and instead struck a deal that would allow a third party, CrowdStrike, to conduct the investigation and gather the information, which it would share with the FBI. James Comey, then-FBI director, agreed to this deal rather than pushing for direct access.
This poorly mitigated agreement allowed all information gained by the FBI, and thus the Robert Mueller investigative team, to first flow through CrowdStrike and Alperovitch, who is linked to an anti-Russian think tank with Deep State funding.
From CrowdStrike, the FBI received only preliminary reports. There was no final report written, according to documents released in submitted motions from the ongoing Roger Stone case. In Senate Intelligence Committee hearings, Comey also confirmed that he had received no actual server content from CrowdStrike, only preliminary reports from the organization that he called “a high-class entity.”
The CrowdStrike saga reveals the origin of Russiagate quite clearly: The DNC was hacked. They hired an anti-Russian company founded by a fellow at an anti-Russian think tank to say, “Russia did it!” Rather than allowing the FBI, America’s ranking law enforcement agency, to investigate a hack that supposedly turned the country’s greatest democratic process upside down, the DNC bucked the FBI in favor of Alperovitch, whom Comey approved.
S.T. Patrick holds degrees in both journalism and social studies education. He spent 10 years as an educator and now hosts the “Midnight Writer News Show.” His email is [email protected]. He is also an occasional contributor to TBR history magazine and the current managing editor of Deep Truth Journal (DTJ), a new conspiracy-focused publication available from the AFP Online Store.
