I have not seen any evidence that that was anything other than the natural result of trying to get a large number of people to remember every single foreign official that they have ever interacted with (for all we know they failed to report a bunch of other officials from a bunch of other nations as well and we never heard about it because it doesn’t fit the Russiagate narrative), possibly combined with a fear of a fact-free McCarthyite feeding frenzy leading people to be less forthcoming than they otherwise would be.