U.S. intelligence officials were bilked out of $100,000 last year by a Russian operative offering stolen National Security Agency cyber weapons and compromising information on President Donald Trump, according to the New York Times.

The Russian reportedly offered to deliver an unverified “15-second clip of a video showing a man in a room talking to two women,” purported to be Trump with two prostitutes in Moscow in 2013.

ADVERTISEMENT

It is unclear if that video is related to a salacious detail found within the controversial Fusion GPS dossier, which alleged Trump paid two prostitutes to urinate on a bed at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton hotel that former President Barack Obama once slept in.

Intelligence officials said they “saw the information, especially the video, as the stuff of tabloid gossip pages, not intelligence collection.”

American intelligence officials who spoke with the Times insisted they paid the $100,000 to the Russian operative to get back stolen NSA cyber weapons and were not seeking the supposedly damaging intelligence. The payment was a first installment of the operative’s $1 million demand, and intelligence officials “cut off the deal because they were wary of being entangled in a Russian operation to create discord inside the American government.”

The Russian operative, the report continues, “claimed the information would link the president and his associates to Russia.” He never provided the NSA hacking weapons, and instead “produced unverified and possibly fabricated information” about Trump that included “bank records, emails and purported Russian intelligence data.”

American officials told the Times on condition of anonymity that the NSA used their official Twitter account, @NSAGov, to communicate in code with the Russian, who was known to the intelligence community for his ties to “Russian intelligence and cyber criminals.”

ADVERTISEMENT

The operative’s “eagerness” to provide them with the supposed damaging information, those officials said, led them to suspect he was attempting to bait them into stoking animosity between the American intelligence community and the president as part of a Russian operation to sow division within the U.S. government.

(Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that the NSA had paid for damaging information on Trump.)