On July 25, 2019, the president of the United States got on the phone with the president of Ukraine and made a strange request:
“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 president said. It is unclear whether the ellipses indicate that words were omitted or that Mr. Trump’s voice was trailing off.
Then he added one novel detail: “The server, they say Ukraine has it.”
One might ask who Donald Trump was referring to when he said, “they say…”
That might imply more than one person is saying it. But the only person anyone has identified who has made an argument resembling the president’s is a dude named George Eliason.
George Eliason, an American journalist who lives in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists fought Ukrainian forces, has written extensively about what he considers to be a “coup attempt” against President Trump involving American and Ukrainian intelligence agencies and CrowdStrike. He said he did not know if his writings for obscure websites might have influenced the president.
“CrowdStrike and Ukrainian Intel are working hand in glove,” he wrote in an email. “Is Ukrainian Intelligence trying to invent a reason for the U.S. to take a hardline stance against Russia? Are they using CrowdStrike to carry this out?”
If that guy sounds like a crank, that’s because he is. He’s also promulgating Kremlin propaganda.
Somehow the president found some free time between operating his Twitter machine, watching cable news, golfing, and suborning perjury to find the one of the dumbest conspiracy theories on the interwebs. Maybe Vladimir Putin gave him a printout at one of their many private meetings.
Today, White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney offered a modified limited hang-out by copping to a quid pro quo request in exchange for releasing Ukraine’s military aid. His argument, however, is that Trump didn’t want information on Joe and Hunter Biden but only on who dimed out Paul Manafort in 2016 and where the hell is the DNC’s server? In other words, Trump was solely concerned about the past, and not the 2020 campaign.
This is contradicted by the White House’s own version of a transcript of the call where Trump explicitly requested an investigation of the Bidens in addition to his request that his CrowdStrike insanity be treated with seriousness.
But, even granting this lie, the argument now is transformed into a defense based on the fact that President Trump believed an asinine line of Kremlin propaganda.
For one thing, there is no singular server associated with the hacking of the Democratic National Headquarters in 2016.
Trump still thinks — and has often mentioned — that a mysterious DNC server with the “real” information on it has gone missing, and that CrowdStrike (and the FBI) is somehow involved in its disappearance. He brought the issue up during his Helsinki meeting alongside Putin.
“You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server,” the president said during the July 2018 press conference. “Where is the server? I want to know, where is the server and what is the server saying?”
But here’s the problem: There is actually no missing physical server associated with the DNC breach to speak of. Instead, the roughly 140 servers — most of them cloud-based — are already out of use.
For another thing, CrowdStrike is a California-based web security company that was hired by the DNC to investigate the hack. They determined that the Russians were behind it and the intelligence community confirmed their findings and have successfully used those findings in court. It is not run by a Ukrainian. It was not founded by a Ukrainian. This is a close as anything comes to matching that fantasy:
In a 2017 interview with the Associated Press, for example, Trump said CrowdStrike was “Ukraine-based” — even though its headquarters are in California. “I heard it’s owned by a very rich Ukrainian, that’s what I heard,” he continued.
That’s incorrect. The company’s cofounder, the Russian-born US citizen Dmitri Alperovitch, is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington, which receives funding from Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk.
Somehow, the president has been convinced that CrowdStrike is a Ukrainian company, founded by a Ukrainian, financed by a different rich Ukrainian and that they have secretly shipped a solitary server to Ukraine that holds evidence that Ukraine was responsible for hacking the DNC.
None of this is true, but this did not prevent Trump from putting his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, in charge of an effort to prove that these things are true. To accomplish this, Giuliani, who is not a government employee and holds no security clearance, was put in charge of America’s foreign policy in Ukraine. State Department employees were forced to do his bidding and an esteemed ambassador was defamed and then unceremoniously recalled from Kiev because she wasn’t a team-player.
This is supposed to be a defense for the president. It’s all okay because it wasn’t about winning the 2020 election.
Except, that’s also a lie.
MEMORANDUM OF TELEPHONE CONVERSATION
SUBJECT: Telephone Conversation with President Zelenskyy of Ukraine
Participants: President Zelenskyy of Ukraine
Notetakers: The White House Situation Room
Date, Time July 25, 2019, 9:03-9:33 am EDT
and Place: ResidencePRESIDENT TRUMP: “Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that. The other thing, There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me.”
This is the worst defense ever concocted in human history.
This is the “everybody does it” defense. So what is the problem with you liberals? Obama did this all the time.
A presidency that will live in infamy.
Neo-confederate turd Micky M is the Martin Bormann of the National Trumpalist movement, controlling access to the poor-man’s Fuhrer and (trying) to set the domestic agenda, albeit with about one half the cleverness and intellect of his Nazi predecessor. Like Bormann, he has staked his future on the success of the movement, and will live or die with it.
This gambit by Mick was necessary because it seeks to evade the strongest charge of abuse of office, the (illegal) request to a foreign power to manufacture dirt on a likely political opponent. It seeks to change the focus to something that seems less illegal: getting to the supposed “truth” of what happened in the 2016 election, setting the record straight for posterity–as though that’s something Donald Trump cares a whit about. Yes, Der Trumper is truly a man on the side of historical truth!
What’s hilarious, of course, is that in doing so our Bormann Jr stepped into the dog shit by conceding that Der Trumper WAS presenting Ukraine with a “quid pro quo”. The linkage of some action to the ask was completely irrelevant to the crime, since the request was all that was needed—but it’s nice to have the coercion conceded as well.
But as the Trumpalists seek to move the goalposts and redefine the story, it should be made clear that even the modified version doesn’t help Der Trumper much, since it is clear to any non-cultist that coercing a foreign government to open an “investigation” that would manufacture historical revisionism on who aided whom in 2016 was itself clearly intended for Trumper’s use as a candidate in 2020–and thus a campaign finance crime as well. And obviously still an abuse of office by (concededly!) coercing foreign assistance to aid a political campaign. It’s now up to the Dems to say that (1) Mick’s modified goal is ridiculous, and (2) it doesn’t change the fact of abuse even if true.