Per “transcript,” Trump seems to think DNC-hired security firm is from Ukraine | Ars Technica

Lost in translation —

CrowdStrike, "one of your wealthy people," mentioned in rambling reconstruction of phone call.

Sean Gallagher - Sep 25, 2019 5:25 pm UTC

Blessed are the note takers.

The White House has released what a spokesperson called a "memorandum of a telephone conversation" between US President Donald Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in response to accusations that Trump attempted to coerce Zelensky into investigating a company associated with Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joseph Biden. In that reconstruction—which is, as per the memorandum, "not a verbatim transcript of a discussion," Trump asked Zelensky to "do us a favor" in what appears to be a reference to the investigation of the hacking of the Democratic National Committee:

The President: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. 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.

Trump has previously referred to CrowdStrike as a Ukrainian company. The reference to the server appears to be related to a conspiracy theory that one of the DNC's servers had been hidden from the FBI. But CrowdStrike's co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a US citizen of Russian heritage, and the company is based in the United States and is publicly traded on the NASDAQ exchange.

In a statement to Ars, a CrowdStrike spokesperson said, "With regards to our investigation of the DNC hack in 2016, we provided all forensic evidence and analysis to the FBI. As we’ve stated before, we stand by our findings and conclusions that have been fully supported by the US Intelligence community."