The U.S. intelligence community spent $100,000 in the past year during an operation to recover stolen, classified National Security Agency documents from Russian operatives, according to reports Friday.
In early 2017, American intelligence officials opened a communications channel with a Russian operative who agreed to sell documents stolen from the NSA and also insisted on including damaging material gathered on President Trump, the Intercept reported Friday.
Intelligence officials reportedly made it clear that they were not interested in the material regarding Trump. However, after handing over $100,000 of the $1 million dollar deal they had struck with the Russian, the officials were given unverified information about Trump, including bank records, emails, and what appeared to be Russian intelligence data, according to the New York Times.
The American officials then cut off the deal, skeptical of the Russian operative and fearful of political fallout if it was reported that they were buying damning information about Trump.
“The people swindled here were James Risen and Matt Rosenberg,” Dean Boyd, director of CIA public affairs, told the Washington Examiner, referring to the authors of the Intercept and New York Times reports respectively. “The fictional story that CIA was bilked out of $100,000 is patently false.”
During the early stages of the negotiations, an American businessman based in Germany acted as a liaison between America and the Russians. Officials spent months tracking the Russian’s moves and the NSA used their official Twitter account to send coded messages to the Russian, the New York Times report said.
The Russian reportedly had a history of money laundering and owned a close-to-bankrupt company that sold portable grills as a cover-up.
