Right out of the Russian counterintelligence playbook
The interactions carry all the signs of a classic Russian intelligence operation, said Rick Smith, a former FBI counterintelligence agent who served at the bureau for 25 years. He added that one should "count on" the notion that the FSB and SVR — Russia's primary foreign espionage agency — were directly involved.

Joseph Pelcher, a former FBI agent who was stationed in Russia and specialized in organized crime, echoed that point.

The Russians' modus operandi, he said, was to offer adversaries "what they want and then give them what you really want them to have. If you can sow discord between the intelligence agencies and whatever administration is in power, then you've done your job."

Because of their underlying value, Americans attempted to move forward with a deal to re-acquire the stolen cyberweapons multiple times last year. But after several meetings between October and December of 2017, during which the businessman only handed over the alleged kompromat on Trump and not the hacking tools, US officials cut off the deal and warned him to go back to Russia and never return, the report said.

The Russian appeared to be pulling from two related tactics in a counterintelligence playbook the Kremlin often favors. One was to embark on a disinformation campaign to stoke discord about the Steele dossier and, to a broader extent, the Russia investigation as a whole. The other was to dangle seemingly explosive information about the president to gauge whether US officials took the bait.

The latter tactic, sources told The Times, led American spies brokering the deal to believe Russia was working to pit the US intelligence community against a president who has accused top officials of conspiring against him.