What Politico reported on is still valid - Manafort's connection to Ukraine, Chalupa trying to dig up dirt, etc. There's no question that Ukraine supported Hillary. What the Washington Examiner - a beacon of right-wing journalism - is trying to do is to tie all of that into the false narrative that it was Ukraine and not Russia that meddled in the 2016 election.
This has been thoroughly debunked by our own intelligence community. The claim that it was the Ukrainians who hacked the DNC server should make no sense at all to anyone with a functioning brain stem. Why would they hack the DNC server, steal emails, and release them if they supported Clinton? That's not a conspiracy theory, that's Russian propaganda, and for some reason, much of the GOP has bought into it. Trump brought it up again during his 50+ minute rant on Fox & Friends Friday morning.
The facts:
There is no DNC server - never has been. Their "server" is a network of about 150 physical and cloud-based computers. Trump's claim that they "told the FBI to get lost and gave the server to a company owned by a wealthy Ukranian" is nonsense.
The FBI doesn't confiscate computers to investigate a hack - they take disk images, which Crowdstrike provided to them. Crowdstrike is an American company, headquartered in California. It trades on NASDAQ (symbol CRWD). It was co-founded by an immigrant who was born in Russia - not Ukraine - and is their CTO, not their owner.
Politico is a legitimate news source; the Washington Examiner is marginal, as evidenced by their attempt to suggest that Politico is now denying their own reporting. Politico, like all legitimate news sources, will issue a retraction if they got the reporting wrong. |
