Request to Investigate 2016 Election
President Trump then explained the “favor” he wanted President Zelensky to do. He first requested that Ukraine investigate a discredited conspiracy theory aimed at undercutting the U.S. Intelligence Community’s unanimous conclusion that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.590 Specifically, President Trump stated:
- 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. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.591
President Trump was referencing the widely debunked conspiracy theory that the Ukrainian government—and not Russia—was behind the hack of Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers in 2016, and that the American cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike moved the DNC’s servers to Ukraine to prevent U.S. law enforcement from examining them. This theory is often referred to in shorthand as “CrowdStrike” and has been promoted by the Russian government.592
For example, during a press conference in February 2017, just weeks after the U.S. Intelligence Community unanimously assessed in a public report that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election to benefit the candidacy of Donald J. Trump, President Putin falsely asserted that “the Ukrainian government adopted a unilateral position in favour of one candidate. More than that, certain oligarchs, certainly with the approval of the political leadership, funded this candidate, or female candidate, to be more precise.”593 President Trump’s reference in his July 25 telephone call to “one of your wealthy people” tracked closely with President Putin’s accusations that “certain oligarchs” in Ukraine meddled in the 2016 U.S. election to support Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
Dr. Hill, an expert on Russia and President Putin, testified that the claim that “Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country and that perhaps, somehow for some reason, Ukraine did” is “a fictional narrative that is being perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.” Dr. Hill reaffirmed that the U.S. Intelligence Community’s January 2017 conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election is “beyond dispute, even if some of the underlying details must remain classified.”594
Tom Bossert, President Trump’s former Homeland Security Advisor, stated publicly that the CrowdStrike theory is “not only a conspiracy theory, it is completely debunked.”595 Dr. Hill testified that White House officials—including Mr. Bossert and former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster—“spent a lot of time” refuting the CrowdStrike conspiracy theory to President Trump. Dr. Hill explained that Mr. Bossert and others “who were working on cybersecurity laid out to the President the facts about the interference.” She affirmed that
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