Media, not Trump, was responsible for need to extract Russian spy

Washington Examiner:

New details about a high-level CIA informant close to the Kremlin cast doubt on President Trump playing a role in the lead-up to the decision to extract the individual from Russia in 2017.

Hours after CNN reported Trump's handling of classified information was the inciting incident leading to this spy's extraction, a follow-up story from the New York Times cited sources who insisted media scrutiny alone is what jeopardized the safety of this source.

The informant, recruited by the CIA decades ago, has been described as a mid-level Russian official who was outside Vladimir Putin's inner circle, and yet saw Putin on a regular basis and was privy to high-level information. This Moscow spy's intel was key to the U.S. intelligence community's conclusion that Putin himself ordered a Russian interference campaign in the U.S. 2016 election.

The identity of this ex-informant has not been revealed in order protect him or her from Russian reprisal.

CNN's Jim Sciutto reported the informant was extracted in 2017 after Trump met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the Oval Office in May 2017 and disclosed some classified information about an anti-ISIS operation in Syria. Although CNN mentioned that concerns for the informant's safety dated back to the end of the Obama administration, the report stressed that Trump's actions were the inciting incident to revisit prior conversations.

But the New York Times tells a different story and led to Sciutto to acknowledge there is more than what he initially reported.

The follow-up report said media inquiries about CIA sources, following the U.S. intelligence community's detailed statements blaming Putin for directing the election interference effort, prompted officials to worry about the informant's safety and led to an offer for extraction in 2016. The informant initially refused, citing concerns about family. Some American counterintelligence officials took this as a reason to be skeptical of the source's trustworthiness.

Months later, after Trump's meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak, there was more media scrutiny and the informant accepted another offer for extraction, reassuring U.S. officials who had begun to doubt this individual. Former intelligence officials said "there was no public evidence that Mr. Trump directly endangered the source" and current U.S. officials "insisted that media scrutiny of the agency’s sources alone was the impetus for the extraction," according to the Times.
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So it was the media frenzy in response to their efforts to push the Russian collusion hoax that caused th US to lose a valuable source of information from Russia.  It is another example of how the coup attempt against the President did damage to US national security.