Trump Repeats False Ukraine Claims

President Donald Trump called into “Fox & Friends” a day after the impeachment hearings ended and repeated false statements that have been debunked by fact-checkers and, in some cases, members of his own administration.

• Trump repeated the baseless theory that the Democratic National Committee gave its computer server to a “Ukrainian company.” In fact, the DNC hired U.S.-based company CrowdStrike to investigate the cyberattack on its network during the 2016 elections, and CrowdStrike said it has “never taken physical possession of any DNC servers.”
• Trump continued to push the false narrative that European countries aren’t sharing the financial burden in terms of aid to Ukraine, saying that’s the main reason he withheld U.S. security aid. In fact, according to several sources, the European Union’s aid to Ukraine far surpasses that from the United States.
• The president falsely said that Rep. Adam Schiff waited three days after giving a dramatic rendition of Trump’s July 25 phone call to claim the rendition was in “parody” after Schiff “got caught.” Schiff said it was partly in parody about an hour after his embellished version, which was clearly perceived as dramatized by some at the time.
• The White House-released memo on Trump’s July 25 phone call to Ukraine’s president corroborates the whistleblower’s main points about that call, despite Trump’s repeated false claim that the whistleblower complaint “bore no relationship to my call.”

Bogus CrowdStrike Claims

The day before Trump’s call to the cable morning show, Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council aide, testified at a public hearing and debunked the theory that Ukraine, and not Russia, conducted a campaign to interfere in the 2016 elections.

“This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves,” in her opening