'You guys are based in California, not Ukraine, right?' — an analyst mocked Trump's CrowdStrike conspiracy on the firm's earnings call
by finanzen.net GmbH- An analyst mocked Donald Trump's false claim that CrowdStrike is a Ukrainian company, during the American cybersecurity firm's latest earnings call.
- "I just wanted to clarify, you guys are based in California, not Ukraine, right?" Needham analyst Alex Henderson jokingly asked CrowdStrike's management.
- Trump said he'd heard CrowdStrike was "owned by a very rich Ukrainian" and "Ukraine-based" during an interview in 2017.
- The US president referenced a wild conspiracy about CrowdStrike — that it's hiding a Democratic National Committee server in Ukraine containing incriminating evidence about the Democrats and the 2016 election — during the phone call with Ukraine's president that sparked the ongoing impeachment hearings.
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An analyst mocked Donald Trump's false claim that CrowdStrike is a Ukrainian company during the American cybersecurity firm's earnings call last week.
"I just wanted to clarify, you guys are based in California, not Ukraine, right?" Needham analyst Alex Henderson asked.
"That would be correct — Sunnyvale, California," CrowdStrike's cofounder and CEO, George Kurtz, replied.
Henderson confirmed he was poking fun at the US president's claim about CrowdStrike in an email to Business Insider. "They are as American as apple pie," he said.
CrowdStrike was cofounded by Dmitri Alperovitch, who was born in Moscow and moved to the US as a teenager. Yet in an Associated Press interview in 2017, Trump said he'd "heard it's owned by a very rich Ukrainian" and it's "Ukraine-based."
Trump's suspicions about CrowdStrike are rooted in the Democratic National Committee's hiring of the firm to fight off hackers that gained access to its email and chat servers and stole data in 2016. CrowdStrike traced the attacks to a Russian group, and worked with the DNC and government investigators to decommission and rebuild the compromised computer systems.
CrowdStrike's involvement with the DNC and the false rumors about its Ukrainian links sparked a wild conspiracy that it's hiding a computer server in Ukraine containing incriminating evidence about the Democrats and the 2016 election.
Trump referenced the conspiracy during his infamous July phone call with Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, according to the transcript released by the White House.
"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," Trump told Zelensky.
The ongoing impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives are centered on whether Trump tried to secure a quid pro quo with Zelensky: the release of US military aid to Ukraine in exchange for the opening of an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden's son, Hunter.