The server fell behind the couch
Trump in his long conversation with Fox News repeated his lie that Ukraine blah blah blah.
Trump called in to “Fox & Friends” and said he was trying to root out corruption in the Eastern European nation when he withheld aid over the summer. Trump’s July 25 call with Ukraine’s president is at the center of the House impeachment probe, which is looking into Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate political rivals as he held back nearly $400 million.
But he repeated his assertion that Ukrainians might have hacked the Democratic National Committee’s network in 2016 and framed Russia for the crime, a theory his own advisers have dismissed.
“They gave the server to CrowdStrike, which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian,” Trump said. “I still want to see that server. The FBI has never gotten that server. That’s a big part of this whole thing.”
CrowdStrike is not owned by any Ukrainian, rich or poor or supernatural or anything else. It’s a California company.
In fact, company co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch is a Russian-born U.S. citizen who immigrated as a child and graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
So that makes him Ukrainian. Don’t you get it? That’s how they fool us!
The president repeated his claim one day after Fiona Hill, a former Russia adviser on the White House National Security Council, admonished Republicans for pushing unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
“Based on questions and statements I have heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did,” Hill testified before the House impeachment inquiry panel. “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”
And that’s why Trump is echoing it.
Sorry, Trump, but you’re too late:
https://mobile.twitter.com/TheOnion/status/1198003257563439104
The trouble with this whole narrative is there is no server. There isn’t a single piece of hardware to be had, in the way Trump seems to think. That’s not how the modern world works. Most organizations including political campaigns outsource this stuff to a third-party. That’s not to mention virtualization services like AWS which may provide another layer. Because if you actually buy the hardware and set up your own server etc, that’s a lot of work and it takes specialized expertise not just to install it but to keep it running. I would know, I have a server of my own.
Of course, most people outside of IT and a few other specialized fields like mine don’t know this. I’m not sure how many people even know what a server is in anything but the vaguest sense, if at all. So Trump can endlessly repeat this narrative and nobody can shoot it down by explaining why this is stupid.
That’s why I made the fell behind the couch joke.
Just to play devil’s advocate it is possible that there was a local “hardware” server even if they did go through some third party email service. In fact given the sensitive nature of SecOState emails I would have configured email to be able to use both, with the local server configured to back up everything in and out and be able to serve as the primary SMTP in a hot minute should the third party “server” go offline. Not so long ago I managed to set up a client (municipality in NJ) that wanted 10 users on Gmail and everyone else on the local in house system (sendmail on Red Hat). It took some crazy ass alias voodoo back and forth between them but I pulled it off. I have no idea how or if Gmail kept archives but every incoming and outgoing message to the domain got copied locally and saved to an ISO file that could be made into a DVD archive every month by the client.
Kludgey as hell but good enough for government work!
All that said, there definitely isn’t a hardware server any more. :^)