Someone is trying to stop reporting on connections between Russia and the Trump campaign by tricking reporters into publishing false stories on the hacking scandal, Rachel Maddow claims.

The MSNBC anchor devoted nearly half her show Thursday night to a report on how someone had leaked her what appeared to be top-secret NSA documents, implicating a member of the Trump campaign in Russia's scheme to influence the 2016 presidential election.

After speaking with several national security officials about the documents, Maddow now believes that they are forged.

She says the real story is that someone is trying to trick news outlets into publishing the documents, discrediting all future reporting on the story when they turn out to be false.

Maddow's report comes just a week after three CNN journalists resigned in the wake of a story about the Trump-Russia affair that turned out to be untrue.

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Rachel Maddow says someone tried to shop her forged NSA documents, implicating a member of the Trump campaign in working with the Russians on their hack of the 2016 election

The MSNBC host said on her show Thursday night that she believes whoever sent the documents wanted her to publish them, in order to discredit her and all other reporters covering the Trump-Russia connections. Above, Trump and Russian President Putin at the G20 summit on Friday

On the show, Maddow described in detail how her team discovered that they were being served forged documents.

She says they received the documents through her leaking website, SendItToRachel.com, on June 7.

At first, her team was excited by the documents because they named a specific member of the Trump campaign as having worked with the Russians to hack the election in favor of the mogul.

'Politically, this thing is so sensitive it takes all of the air out of the room and all of the nearby rooms as well,' Maddow said. 'People talk about finding the smoking gun. What we got sent to us was not just a smoking gun, it was a gun still firing proverbial bullets.'

Politically, this thing is so sensitive it takes all of the air out of the room and all of the nearby rooms as well,' Maddow said. 'People talk about finding the smoking gun. What we got sent to us was not just a smoking gun, it was a gun still firing proverbial bullets.

However, several details with the reports caused them to become suspicious of the documents, including weird spacing, typos and dates that didn't make sense.

Eventually they grew to believe that the document had actually been a cut-and-paste job taken from a real NSA report leaked to The Intercept.

A little more than a month ago, The Intercept published a top-secret NSA report detailing Russia's hacking effort days before the 2016 election.

In order to confirm the story, reporters at The Intercept reached out to the NSA and showed them the documents to confirm that they were authentic. The NSA did not officially confirm them, but did appear to legitimize them by asking that certain parts of the documents be redacted, which The Intercept complied with.

Then, two days before The Intercept even published their story, the Justice Department announced that they had arrested the contractor who allegedly leaked the documents to The Intercept, Reality Winner.

On her show, Maddow pointed out one of the ways the FBI may have been able to track Winner down - through a little-known function of modern printers. Apparently, each printer has its own fingerprint of sorts, that prints out a barely visible pattern of dots on a page. Those dots contain the serial number of the exact printer that they originated from, along with the date and time they were printed.

Maddow believes that the documents she received are a copy-and-paste forgery based on the NSA documents leaked to The Intercept last month. She points to a little-known printer 'fingerprint' that can be found on The Intercept's documents, which include information on the exact printer used and the date and time printed

That fingerprint matches up to the one on the documents sent to The Rachel Maddow Show, which wouldn't make sense since it's highly unlikely the Maddow documents were printed off at the exact time from the same printer as The Intercept documents, which contain different information

A similar crease is also seen on both documents. The Intercept document is above, and the Maddow document is below.

What's interesting about these dots is that they showed up in the same pattern on the documents that Maddow received, which were very obviously not the same documents since the Intercept posted theirs online on June 5, when they published their report.

The documents also showed a crease mark on the page, similar to the one FBI investigators noted about the documents allegedly leaked by Winner.

Our document appears to be a cut-and-paste forgery derived from The Intercept's document.

'Our document appears to be a cut-and-paste forgery derived from The Intercept's document,' Maddow said.

Even further digging by Maddow's team revealed a murkier detail from the documents. Though the documents were sent to Maddow on June 7, two days after the Intercept published them online, metadata shows that the documents were created just after noon on June 5, two days after Winner was arrested but nearly four hours before they were published by The Intercept.

That means that whoever tried to shop Maddow the documents, had access to the documents leaked to The Intercept before they even got into the public's hands. At that point, presumably only The Intercept, NSA workers, FBI investigators and other government officials involved in hunting down the leaker would have had access to the documents, if they hadn't been somehow compromised in a hack or leaked elsewhere.

According to the metadata found on the Maddow documents, it also appears that whoever 'forged' them did so before The Intercept documents were released to the public

'We can not know for sure, but if that is the case, then whoever did that work to create this forgery was cutting and pasting together a fake document, working from a document that was not yet publicly available...

'Is this timeline a clue as to who contacted us and sent us this document? We don't know,' she said.

There were also some other red flags with the document, including typos and weird spacing. There's also a date on the document, saying when it can be declassified, which doesn't match up to the time when it was said to have been produced.

However, the biggest red flag, Maddow says, was the fact that the documents named an American citizen.

'The document we were sent, which we believe to be a forgery, names a specific person in the Trump campaign as working with the Russians on their hacking attack on the election last year.

'And the specific name of the Trump campaign person is irrelevant and I am not sharing it now because we believe from how the NSA works, from multiple conversations with current and former officials familiar with documents of this type, we believe that a U.S. citizen's name would never appear in a document like this,' she said.

Maddow says the real story is that someone is out there, trying to shop these documents to news outlets like her own, in what she believe is an attempt to discredit all future reporting from the media on the Trump-Russia affair.

She points to a similar case in 2004, when CBS ran a story based on documents from George W. Bush's commander in the Air National Guard, which were critical of his service. Those documents later turned out to have been forged, resulting in anchor Dan Rather resigning from CBS.

Whether or not the Trump campaign did it, one way to stab in the heart aggressive American reporting on that subject is to lay traps for American journalists who are reporting on it. Trick news organizations into reporting what appears to be evidence of what happened, and then - after the fact - blow that reporting up.

After that, Maddow says all other outlets pretty much stayed away from reporting on Bush's military career, and two months later he went on to win re-election.

Maddow says someone could be trying to get the same result with the Trump-Russia story, by passing around forged documents like the one she received.

'Whether or not the Trump campaign did it, one way to stab in the heart aggressive American reporting on that subject is to lay traps for American journalists who are reporting on it. Trick news organizations into reporting what appears to be evidence of what happened, and then - after the fact - blow that reporting up.

'You then hurt the credibility of that news organization, you also cast a shadow over any similar reporting in the future, whether or not it's true. Even it it's true, you plant a permanent question, a permanent asterisk, a permanent 'Who knows?' as to whether that too might be false, like that other story. Whether that too might be based on faked evidence.

'So heads up everybody, part of the defense against this Trump-Russia story, now, we can report, includes somebody apparently forging at least one classified NSA report and shopping it to a news organizations as if it's real.

'We don't know who's doing it, but we're working on it,' Maddow said.

The issue is that the person or group behind the alleged plot may have already been successful.

Just last week, three CNN reporters resigned over a story which tied a Russian investment fund with Trump officials turned out to be false.

CNN later said that the story was based off of a single anonymous source, and in retrospect the story 'did not meet CNN's editorial standards'.

It's unclear whether the anonymous source behind the CNN story was in any way related to the Maddow leaker.