Donald Trump misrepresented a New York Times story in order to attack his own intelligence agencies.

According to the @nytimes, a Russian sold phony secrets on “Trump” to the U.S. Asking price was $10 million, brought down to $1 million to be paid over time. I hope people are now seeing & understanding what is going on here. It is all now starting to come out - DRAIN THE SWAMP!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 10, 2018

So that was the Trump tweet from from Friday.

Today this is tweeted out by former sepcial counsel Ryan Goodman.

I think this is important:

CIA Director Pompeo just told the Senate: the NYT story—which
is the basis for Trump’s tweet below—was false. Pompeo’s words: the reporting
was “atrocious” and “ridiculous.”

Someone should ask White House why Trump then used the NYT story like this 👇 https://t.co/hds8TIxOqW

— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) February 13, 2018

Well that is all well and good to point out that Trump is using false information to smear American intelligence agencies, but Goodman failed to note that Trump completely misrepresented what the Times story said.

Here is the pertinent portion:

After months of secret negotiations, a shadowy Russian bilked American spies out of $100,000 last year, promising to deliver stolen National Security Agency cyberweapons in a deal that he insisted would also include compromising material on President Trump, according to American and European intelligence officials. 

The cash, delivered in a suitcase to a Berlin hotel room in September, was intended as the first installment of a $1 million payout, according to American officials, the Russian and communications reviewed by The New York Times. The theft of the secret hacking tools had been devastating to the N.S.A., and the agency was struggling to get a full inventory of what was missing. 

Several American intelligence officials said they made clear that they did not want the Trump material from the Russian, who was suspected of having murky ties to Russian intelligence and to Eastern European cybercriminals. He claimed the information would link the president and his associates to Russia. Instead of providing the hacking tools, the Russian produced unverified and possibly fabricated information involving Mr. Trump and others, including bank records, emails and purported Russian intelligence data. 

The United States intelligence officials said they cut off the deal because they were wary of being entangled in a Russian operation to create discord inside the American government. They were also fearful of political fallout in Washington if they were seen to be buying scurrilous information on the president.

Now of course I have no sources to prove the accuracy of this reporting, or to discredit it. But it should be noted that the article does NOT say that the intelligence agencies were shopping around for dirt on Trump.

In fact they were trying very hard NOT to access any potential dirt on Trump.

What they were after was to get back the stolen NSA cyber weapons that have made it so easy for the Russians to hack agencies and businesses here in America.

Now if the intelligence agencies were tricked out of $100,000 dollars in pursuit of those, that could be a story in an of itself.

But this article clearly states that the agencies were wary of stumbling onto any potentially information about Trump's ties to Russia, and aborted the mission in order to escape entanglement.

Neither one of the above tweets reflect accurately the contents of the actual article.