The Russian received the U.S. taxpayer cash in a Berlin hotel room in September as the first installment on the $1 million price tag set for what he claimed would be compromising material on the U.S. president and a collection of NSA and CIA hacking tools stolen in 2016.
Trump tweeted about the Times story early on Saturday.
“According to the @nytimes, a Russian sold phony secrets on ‘Trump’ to the U.S. Asking price was $10 million, brought down to $1 million to be paid over time,” the president wrote. “I hope people are now seeing & understanding what is going on here. It is all now starting to come out - DRAIN THE SWAMP!”
Trump followed up with a tweet quoting the President of Judicial Watch, who had been on Fox News explaining how Trump had been victimized by the Obama administration’s illicit spy operation.
The CIA declined the Times request for comment and the NSA wrote that “all N.S.A. employees have a lifetime obligation to protect classified information.”
The CIA worked through an American businessman to “preserve deniability,” the Times reported. The NSA meanwhile went as far as to send the Russian coded messages via its official Twitter account.
The unnamed officials said that the Russian played the American businessman a 15-second clip showing an unidentifiable man in a room talking to two women. The viewing of the clip took place at the Russian embassy in Berlin.
The Russian had a history of money laundering and ran a nearly bankrupt cover business that sold portable grills for streetside sausage salesmen in the United Kingdom. Despite that, the Times sources claim that they paid the Russian primarily in order to obtain the stolen NSA and CIA cyberweapons.
When the murky operative failed to deliver, the sources claim, they cut off the relationship in fear of it being discovered that they paid Russians for dirt on the president.
CIA spokesman Dean Boyd denied the story on Saturday.
The report of the CIA’s alleged deal with the Russian is the latest in a deluge of revelations concerning the Obama administration’s abuse of power and government surveillance against Trump and his associates.
An explosive memo declassified by Trump more than a week ago shows that top officials at the FBI and DOJ used an unverified and politically motivated anti-Trump dossier to obtain a warrant to surveil Trump associate Carter Page.
The dossier was paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee during the presidential race. Fusion GPS, the company tasked with the work, also took money from Russia while the document was being compiled by a British ex-spy who was being given most of his information from sources with Kremlin ties.
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