A story that’s been swept under the rug and worth mentioning, is that American spies paid $100,000 in 2017 to what was described by The New York Times as a “shadowy Russian,” who promised to deliver stolen cyberweapons from the National Security Agency (NSA) along with allegedly compromising material on President Trump.
The Russian got 10 percent of a $1 million deal that was apparently supposed to include stolen National Security Agency (NSA) tools used for hacking and purported images of President Trump consorting with hookers in Moscow, US and European intelligence sources told the New York Times.
However, The “shadowy Russian” didn’t provide the National Security Agency (NSA) hacking tools after receiving the payment but instead provided made-up information about President Trump. American spies reportedly chased the Russian out of Western Europe and said he should not return.
The alleged compromising images of president Trump from 2013 turned out to be a dodgy 15-second video clip of some man in a hotel room speaking to two women. The video had no sound or any evidence whatsoever the man in the footage was Donald Trump.
The lengths that the US intelligence went to acquire the ultimately bad source is laughable and desperate.
The US worked through an American businessman in Germany, to maintain deniability, and set up meetings in five-star Berlin hotels and tracked the Russian’s travels throughout Europe – including visits to his mistress in Vienna.
And even with those high-end tactics, the N.S.A. even used its official Twitter account to send coded messages to the Russian nearly a dozen times.
The Russian was apparently known to American and European officials for his ties to Russian intelligence and cybercriminals — two groups that are suspected in the theft of the N.S.A. and C.I.A. hacking tools.
But the Russian’s apparent eagerness to sell the Trump “kompromat” — a Russian term for information used to gain leverage over someone — to American spies raised many suspicions among officials that he was part of an operation to feed the information to United States intelligence agencies and pit them against Donald Trump to favor Hillary Clinton.
Early in the negotiations, for instance, the “shadowy Russian” dropped his initial asking price from $10 million to just over $1 million. Then, just a few months later, that’s when he showed the 15-second clip of a video showing a man in a room talking to two women.
American intelligence officials said the cyberweapons had been built to break into the computer networks of Russia, China, and other rival powers. Instead, they ended up in the hands of a mysterious group that calls itself the Shadow Brokers, which has since provided hackers with tools that infected millions of computers around the world, crippling hospitals, factories, and businesses.
Part of that effort, US officials said, appears to be trying to spread unsubstantiated reports about Trump’s dealings in Russia, including the purported video, whose existence president. Trump has repeatedly dismissed.
But, American spies weren’t the only ones who had been dealing with the Russians. Cody Shearer, an American political operative with ties to the Democratic Party, had been crisscrossing Eastern Europe for over six months to secure the purported Trump kompromat from a different Russian, said people familiar with the efforts, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid damaging their relationship with him.
Reached by phone, Cody Shearer would say only that his work was “a big deal — you know what it is, and you shouldn’t be asking about it.” He then hung up.
Cody Shearer’s efforts grew out of work he first began during the 2016 campaign, when he compiled a pair of reports that, just like the discredited dossier paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, also included talk of a video and Russian payoffs to Trump associates. It is not clear what, if anything, Shearer was able to purchase.
But you can bet your bottom dollar that just like the dossier it was just more fake news, the stuff of bad tabloid magazines.
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