“Russians likely fed salacious but untrue allegations about Trump to ex-British spy Christopher Steele”
Cody Shearer is Russian? I did not know that!
I very much doubt that the coup plotters were merely dummies who were fooled by those wily Russians. But yes, that will be one of their fall-back defenses if any of them ever get prosecuted.
To the extent any Russians were really involved as sources, as supposedly there was a former Russian intelligence officer who has lived in the US for many years who was a source (per Bruce Ohr’s notes), they were probably used as cut-outs for the CIA/MI6 to feed them allegations and then pass it on to Steele as being from “Russians” as part of the set-up of this hoax.
Just as state actors routinely leave the supposed “fingerprints” of another state on their cyberactivity, intel services of course use assets of other nationalities to obscure and finger point in their other activities as well.