President Donald Trump. Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Cody Shearer reportedly spent at least six months in Eastern Europe attempting to purchase compromising information from a Russian on President Donald Trump.

He is a political operative and author of a second Trump-Russia dossier.

The development comes amid news that American spies also attempted to cut a deal with a shadowy Russian that involved dirt on Trump.



An American political operative with ties to the Democratic Party has been meandering around Eastern Europe for months in search of compromising information on President Donald Trump, The New York Times reported on Friday.

The operative, Cody Shearer, is the author of a second Trump-related dossier the FBI is currently examining. The document is believed to independently lay out similar allegations of collusion between Trump and Russia as those contained in the infamous Steele dossier, written by the former British spy Christopher Steele.

Though Shearer's background is in politics and journalism, not espionage, the FBI appears to have taken at least some aspects of it seriously enough to investigate, The Guardian reported.

Shearer has spent at least six months in Eastern Europe attempting to secure damaging material about Trump from an unidentified Russian, sources familiar with his efforts told The Times.

Shearer would say only that his work was "a big deal," when asked by the newspaper about it last year.

"You know what it is, and you shouldn't be asking about it," he said before hanging up.

The news comes amid bombshell reports from The Times and The Intercept that American spies had paid $100,000 to a shadowy Russian who had promised to sell them cyberweapons stolen from the National Security Agency.

Instead of the promised hacking tools, the Russian attempted to push compromising information on Trump, and the Americans cut the deal short and told him to go back to Russia and never return.

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