What’s going on with the National Security Agency’s skepticism over the apparent Russian bounty plot to pay the Taliban to attack U.S. soldiers?

As I noted on Monday, while the CIA has very compelling intelligence (some very closely guarded) that lends to this plot being real, “the other keystone Russia-collection agency, the NSA, appears to have been unable to corroborate the CIA’s reporting with its own signal collection efforts. This means that the United States currently lacks a direct operational link from the plot to the Kremlin (which would figure because communicating with Moscow would trigger attention from various U.S. intelligence capabilities) having been established.”