I think there's tons of problems with the much larger theory this article is part of (but it would make for even more verbose posts than my usual treatises, so I'm letting this play out. We are getting a one sided presentation of the facts through partisan media. To me it seems a transparent attempt to WHATABBOUT Trump's Russia problem and smear the FBI. They know indictments are coming and they need their fans to worked up not just about Comey, but also about Mueller, and Rosenstein and basically law enforcement generally, because so many on Team Trump are about to be defendants.) One problem with the larger theory particularly is that it treats Hillary Clinton as if she were the President of the United States. The article acts the spy swap happened because otherwise it would have been embarrassing to the Hillary The spy swap would have been approved by the President with input from the Intel Community and the National Security Council and it fit squarely within one of President's main foreign policy goals vis a vis Russia: The Russian Reset. The idea was to see if we could work better with after things had gotten pretty tense when Russia went to war on the Republic of Georgia in 2008. We supplied aid to Georgia and sanctioned Russia. When Obama came in he wanted to ease these tensions. We worked out a deal that allowed US military plans to fly supplies to Afghanistan over Russia Airpsace in 2009 and in April of 2010 we signed a new nuclear weapons reduction agreement. In May of 2010 we got Russia to agree to strong new set UN sanctions against Iran for its nuclear program.

So this is the background for what was going on with Russia. If you ignore that use Hillary Clinton as the prism to view this through, it's a distortion. In fact, it's exactly the same distortion used on the UraniumOne story. The sale of UraniumOne was approved by the US government including the Department of Defense and Homeland Security. In fact, at the time, Clinton was portrayed as to be less optimistic than Obama about if we could achieve a reset in relations with Russia and in the longer term she was right. This was especially true after Putin returned the Presidency and things changed for the worst. But at the time there were some wins. The nuclear treaty still needed to ratified by the Senate and this played into Obama's decision to make the swap.

can you also list the credentials on the Russian spies that we arrested.

Yeah, this is all from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegals_Program

I thought people knew about the details of these spies because of the recent articles. The 11 people we detained had no official cover meaning they had to support themselves and get full time jobs in America, so they couldn't devote their full time to spying like someone working out of the Russian embassy. None of these folks were in very sensitive positions, nothing anywhere near equvailent to the people in the KGB/FSB/GRU/SVR that we got. They didn't have specialized knowledge or access, the thing they had that most valuable was the fact that they were sleeper agents, however a few still had thick Russian accents. Their goals seemed to be gather open source (i.e. non-classified) information and develop relationships that might be pay off down the line.

I think getting into the inner circle of the United States Secretary of State would make that one spy pretty damn high level.

Except that didn't happen. First off they were under surveillance for years

http://www.trbimg.com/img-57ca689c/turbine/sdut-in-this-frame-grab-image-from-20160902/512/512x288

Secondly, Lidiya Guryev aka Cynthia Murphy was Alan Patricof's financial advisor. Patricof ran an investment bank Greycroft Partners. This is not being "the inner circle of the United States Secretary of State." He's not Jake Sullivan. Most likely they would have tried to use to him to meet other folks and work their way up the ladder. Also this was the point the FBI shut them down.

After this case

As for who the folks we traded were

Anna Chapman worked at NetJets and Barclays in London and was a model and ran a real estate company in the USA

Mikhail Anatolyevich Vasenkov and Vicky Peláez - He went to grad school and taught a class for one semester at Baruch College before being let go. She was a reporter for El Diario La Prensa, a Spanish language newspaper with a circulation of 35,000.

Andrey Bezrukov and Yelena Vavilova - He studied for a Master's in Public Adminstration at Harvard and worked for the World Future Society. She worked in real estate.

Vladimir and Lidiya Guryev - She got an MBA at Columbia and worked for Financial Services Company. He was a house husband possibly the only one of the group who could spy full time. These two were considered the most important.

Mikhail Kutsik and Nataliya Pereverzeva "worked for several different jobs over the years including telecom company accountant, car salesman, and teleconference firm employee. Pereverzeva was a stay-at-home mom who cared for their toddler son named Kenny; a second son was born in late 2009."

????

Also are you doubting the facts I just laid out? just google spy swap 2010 and find out it.

I appreciate AWS confirming that this story is bullshit. Looks like the Deep State is trying to blame Hillary on the Russians, when she is actually CIA.