The RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA story keeps getting more and more bizarre. And revealing more and more corruption on the part of the federal bureaucracy:
After months of secret negotiations, a shadowy Russian bilked American spies out of $100,000 last year, promising to deliver stolen National Security Agency cyberweapons in a deal that he insisted would also include compromising material on President Trump, according to American and European intelligence officials.
The cash, delivered in a suitcase to a Berlin hotel room in September, was intended as the first installment of a $1 million payout, according to American officials, the Russian and communications reviewed by The New York Times. The theft of the secret hacking tools had been devastating to the N.S.A., and the agency was struggling to get a full inventory of what was missing.
Several American intelligence officials said they made clear that they did not want the Trump material from the Russian — who was suspected of having murky ties to Russian intelligence and to Eastern European cybercriminals. He claimed the information would link the president and his associates to Russia. But instead of providing the hacking tools, the Russian produced unverified and possibly fabricated information involving Mr. Trump and others, including bank records, emails and purported Russian intelligence data.
How are these “American spies” not being arrested already? We already know that the Trump campaign didn’t collude with Russia the way the Hillary campaign did, but as far as we know, even the Hillary campaign didn’t actually offer to PAY the Russians ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
American intelligence, such as it is, more and more appears to be run by Dr. Evil.
The Times obtained four of the documents that the Russian in Germany tried to pass to American intelligence. All are purported to be Russian intelligence reports, and each focuses on associates of Mr. Trump. Carter Page, the former campaign adviser who has been the focus of F.B.I. investigators, features in one; Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the billionaire Republican donors, in another.
Yet all four appear to be drawn almost entirely from news reports, not secret intelligence. They all also contain stylistic and grammatical usages not typically seen in Russian intelligence reports, said Yuri Shvets, a former K.G.B. officer who spent years as a spy in Washington before defecting to the United States just before the end of the Cold War.
On the plus side, someone finally figured out how to make money by publishing news on the Internet. Alert Goldman Sachs, we’ve got a new business model! I love the smell of an IPO in the morning.