At a White House exchange with reporters on Wednesday, Donald Trump repeated a reported conspiracy theory with origins that trace back to the extremist internet message board 4Chan. The scenario claims Ukraine , not Russia, interfered in the 2016 presidential election for the side of Democrat Hillary Clinton, not Trump. Under this purported scenario, as The Inquisitr has previously reported, a Democratic National Committee computer server somehow linked to the 2016 election sabotage is now somewhere in Ukraine.
In fact, at one point in Wednesday’s White House press gathering, Trump mentioned “the server” eight times in a period of just 24 seconds, as seen in the video clip below on this page.
“I still ask the FBI, ‘Where is the server?’ How come the FBI never got the server from the DNC?” Trump said, as quoted via Twitter by Washington Post video editor Jim Rieger. “Where is the server? I want to see the server. Let’s see what’s on the server.”
Trump also asked Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky about “the server” in a July 25 phone call, telling the Ukrainian leader that he believes the supposed server is in the possession of “one of your wealthy people.” But according to a BuzzFeed News report on the origins of the supposed conspiracy theory, “the server” does not actually exist.
24 seconds.
8 times.
He’s deteriorating. pic.twitter.com/3NNPqHtRNL
— J?S??R ? ?C?U?L (@th3j35t3r) October 16, 2019
Instead, the DNC data that was hacked — not by Ukrainians but by Russians according to multiple investigations into the 2016 election sabotage, as The Inquisitr has reported — resided on 140 separate “cloud” servers that were decommissioned in 2016, rather than one single computer that was somehow spirited away to Ukraine, the BuzzFeed investigation reported.
The reported conspiracy theory centers around the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, which conducted the initial investigation into the 2016 hack of DNC servers and discovered evidence that Russia was the perpetrator of the hacking. According to BuzzFeed , posts on the 4Chan message board as far back as March 2017 claimed that Crowdstrike “fictionalized” the “narrative” that Russia was behind the hack.
As a separate Daily Beast investigation into the server theory noted, “Crowdstrike has nothing to do with Ukraine, except in conspiracyland, which pretends that Crowdstrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch is Ukrainian.”
Alperovitch could be the “wealthy” person referenced by Trump in his call with Zelensky. But Alperovitch, in reality, is not Ukrainian. He was born in Russia but fled the country before the fall of the Soviet Union, according to The Daily Beast . The Crowdstrike founder is now a United States citizen.
“Today the secret server hoax is mostly confined to the very edge of the conservative fringe,” wrote Daily Beast reporter Kevin Poulson. But Trump revived the theory in his statements on Wednesday.
