This is intercepted.

I'm Jeremy Skahill coming to you from the offices of the intercept in New York City,

and this is a special bonus episode of Intercepted.

The legendary National Security Reporter James Ryzen has a fascinating new report out at the Intercept,

where he reports that US intelligence agencies opened a secret communications channel with Russian operatives,

and that those Russians were offering to sell, damaging, or compromising intelligence to the United States on Donald Trump.

The discussions have been going on for the past year, Jim reports, and they started with an offer from a Russian intermediary

to give the Americans information on the hacking and theft of NSA files on a wide range of hacking techniques used by the agency.

Those files were allegedly stolen by the hacking group known as Shadowbrokers.

Now, we still don't know who is running Shadowbrokers, but American intelligence is trying to determine how much and what specifically was actually stolen beyond what Shadowbrokers has already made public.

But soon after these negotiations and the offers began, the Russian intermediary started trying to entice the Americans with offers of compromising intelligence.

And Donald Trump for a price.

The New York Times published a version of this story after Jim Ryzen broke this story at the Intercept.com.

The Times and its report concluded that US officials believed it was likely Russian disinformation that was aimed at sowing political discord in the United States.

But Jim Ryzen reports that the CIA, which is headed by Donald Trump loyalist Mike Pompeo, has feared taking possession of compromising information on Donald Trump,

because it might help the special investigator Robert Mueller in his investigation, or that it could spark backlash from Trump himself.

Of course, Trump is famous for targeting and shaming anyone who challenges him or is perceived as anything other than 100% loyal to him.

He values that above all else, especially regarding the Russia investigation.

There's also a truly wild and entertaining aspect to this story about how the NSA used its official public Twitter account to send secret messages to the Russians.

We're going to get into all of this right now with my colleague James Ryzen, his article at the Intercept is titled US secretly negotiated with Russians to buy stolen NSA documents and the Russians offered Trump related material to Jim Ryzen. Welcome to this special episode of intercepted.

Thanks for having me.

So let's just start from the beginning. How did you start working on this story? And and I know that there's not a lot of people can share when you're working with confidential sources and trying to protect your informants, but give us a sense of how you first got onto this story.

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