The New York Times confirms someone was paying off the Russians. Tiny problem: It wasn’t Trump, it was the CIA:
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.
Yeah, right. As Ace of Spades notes:
Note this story is going to claim the CIA paid to get their own stolen cyberweapons/hacking tools back and this Russian just insisted on offering dirt on Trump they didn’t want.
That’s absurd. How do you buy back your own cybertools? You already have the tools; the problem is that other people have them, and paying someone to send you a copy does nothing at all to stop him from selling other copies forever, to whoever he wants.
No, this is about the Trump dirt, and the cyberweapon thing is the cover story.
You know who else went to the Russians for dirt on Trump? Virginia’s senior Democratic senator:
Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee who has been leading a congressional investigation into President Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, had extensive contact last year with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch who was offering Warner access to former British spy and dossier author Christopher Steele, according to text messages obtained exclusively by Fox News.
“We have so much to discuss u need to be careful but we can help our country,” Warner texted the lobbyist, Adam Waldman, on March 22, 2017.
“I’m in,” Waldman, whose firm has ties to Hillary Clinton, texted back to Warner.
Steele famously put together the anti-Trump dossier of unverified information that was used by FBI and Justice Department officials in October 2016 to get a warrant to conduct surveillance of former Trump adviser Carter Page. Despite the efforts, Steele has not agreed to an interview with the committee.
Secrecy seemed very important to Warner as the conversation with Waldman heated up March 29, when the lobbyist revealed that Steele wanted a bipartisan letter from Warner and the committee’s chairman, North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard Burr, inviting him to talk to the Senate intelligence panel.
Throughout the text exchanges, Warner seemed particularly intent on connecting directly with Steele without anyone else on the Senate Intelligence Committee being in the loop — at least initially. In one text to the lobbyist, Warner wrote that he would “rather not have a paper trail” of his messages.
Combine this with the fact that we know the Clinton Campaign/DNC-funded Fusion GPS was already in the pay of Russian nationals, and it becomes clear why Democrats thought they would nail Trump for Russian influence: They were projecting their own sins onto others.
Will the last Democrat not colluding with the Russians please turn out the lights?
