CrowdStrike, the cyber-security firm retained by the Democratic National Committee to probe the hack of their computer servers during the 2016 election, received a passing mention in the transcript released Wednesday of a conversation between President Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart.
“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike…,” Trump told President Volodymyr Zelensky, according to the document, which is not a verbatim recounting of the 30-minute phone call. “The server, they say Ukraine has it.
“There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation.”
The California-based firm traced the hacks of DNC servers during the contentious 2016 election back to a pair of hacker groups with suspected Russian ties.
The discovery was among the early smoke signals in what would explode into the years-long probe of foreign interference in the election, led by special counsel Robert Mueller.
“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,” said Trump in the July 25 call, which came one day after Mueller testified before Congress.
“Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.”
The White House released the transcript — in which Trump discussed the possibility that former Vice President Joe Biden “stopped” a Ukrainian probe into his son Hunter — to confront claims of impropriety against the president.