{"id":348676,"date":"2018-02-17T15:04:40","date_gmt":"2018-02-17T14:04:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/nyts-really-weird-russiagate-story-consortiumnews\/"},"modified":"2018-02-17T15:04:40","modified_gmt":"2018-02-17T14:04:40","slug":"nyts-really-weird-russiagate-story-consortiumnews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/nyts-really-weird-russiagate-story-consortiumnews\/","title":{"rendered":"NYT\u2019s \u2018Really Weird\u2019 Russiagate Story \u2013 Consortiumnews"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Exclusive: The Russiagate narrative has taken a turn toward the surreal with a report in the <em>New York Times<\/em>\u00a0alleging that U.S. spies paid a\u00a0\u201cshadowy Russian\u201d $100,000 for dirt on the president, explains Daniel Lazare.<\/p>\n<p>By Daniel Lazare<\/p>\n<p>A Russian national with ties to cybercrime and Russian intelligence snookered U.S. spooks out of $100,000 by promising them fresh dirt on Donald Trump.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/new-york-times.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/lazy-load\/images\/1x1.trans.gif\" data-lazy-src=\"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/new-york-times-300x150.jpg\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-25939\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\"  \/><noscript><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-25939\" src=\"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/new-york-times-300x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\"  \/><\/noscript><\/a>That\u2019s the takeaway from a strange front-page article that ran in last weekend\u2019s <em>New York Times<\/em>, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/02\/09\/us\/politics\/us-cyberweapons-russia-trump.html\">U.S. Spies, Seeking to Retrieve Cyberweapons, Paid Russian Peddling Trump Secrets<\/a>.\u201d That\u2019s not all the article said, but the rest was so convoluted and implausible that it can be safely discounted.<\/p>\n<p>Even Matthew Rosenberg, the <em>Times<\/em> reporter who wrote the story, described it as \u201ca really weird one\u201d in an\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/slate.com\/news-and-politics\/2018\/02\/the-nyts-crazy-russian-spy-story-explained-by-its-author.html\">interview<\/a>\u00a0with Slate.\u00a0More than merely weird, however, the piece offers valuable insight into the parallel universe that is Russiagate, one in which logic is absent, neo-McCarthyism is rampant, and evidence means whatever the corporate press wants it to mean.<\/p>\n<p>The article says that the U.S. spies were seeking cyberweapons stolen from the National Security Agency by a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers in 2016, but that a \u201cshadowy Russian\u201d kept pushing instead evidence buttressing the \u201cgolden showers\u201d episode in the Christopher Steele dossier.\u00a0The spooks were not interested because they didn\u2019t want to soil their hands with \u201cthe stuff of tabloid gossip pages\u201d and because they feared that the Russian was trying to drive a wedge between the intelligence agencies and the White House. \u00a0As the article puts it:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe United States intelligence officials \u2026 were wary of being entangled in a Russian operation to create discord inside the American government.\u00a0 They were also fearful of political fallout in Washington if they were seen to be buying scurrilous information on the president.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But Rosenberg\u2019s account raises a number of questions. One is why the spooks were \u201cdesperately\u201d trying to retrieve stolen NSA hacking tools in the first place when, as cyber-security experts have <a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/@REEL_ICO_TALK\/nsa-unit-8200-and-malware-proliferation-dd6e075ce26e\">warned<\/a>, stolen malware is essentially irretrievable&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/2018\/02\/16\/nyts-really-weird-russiagate-story\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Exclusive: The Russiagate narrative has taken a turn toward the surreal with a report in the New York Times\u00a0alleging that U.S. spies paid a\u00a0\u201cshadowy Russian\u201d $100,000 for dirt on the president, explains Daniel Lazare. By Daniel Lazare A Russian national with ties to cybercrime and Russian intelligence snookered U.S. spooks out of $100,000 by promising [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2524,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-348676","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2524"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=348676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348676\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=348676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=348676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=348676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}