a) the publicly presented capacity to identify the document source i.e TG, allows the EV 'trap' to be sprung by taking an afadavit from the 'compliant' TG.

b) the identification of the previously unknown source (TG) to Elan Vital allows EV's lawyers to sandbag the unsuspecting TG, who faced with having been dropped in it by the careless JM makes the best of crappy situation in terms of salvaging something for his private life.

Frankly I find 4. a) to be way too tenuous - for it to have worked as a planned strategy it requires an expectation that JM would indeed act very stupidly.

Well, JM did exactly that, act stupidly. Someone knew it would be a huge temptation to at least post the purlioned data on the forum. If you read the email between JM and Gurubler, you'd see that although JM might have been aware of Gurubler's existence, he did not know him personally.

What would possess TG to send to a journalist documents he had obtained illegally? He must have figured JM would do something with them, that is, publicize them. After all, that's what journalists do. Also TG would have know that the documents would be directly and quickly traced backed to him as the source. It appears this was of no concern to TG.