Thank you Ashlan.

Another insightful source to add to my substance reading list.

You really are an amazing researcher.

a US intelligence community whistleblower attested to being aggressively - but unsuccessfully - pressured by superiors into signing off on the infamous 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, which expressed “high confidence” Russia interfered in the previous year’s Presidential election

The whistleblower’s role was to investigate alleged attempts by Moscow “to access US election-related infrastructure”, as “reporting suggested many Russia-attributed IP addresses were making connection attempts that the [US intelligence community] could not explain the purpose of.”

However, an official - name redacted - subsequently “directed us to abandon any further study of the subject,” on the basis it was “something else.”

The whistleblower’s “professional judgment…was multiple nations were seeking to shape the views of the US electorate,” and therefore influence their voting preferences. This assessment was based not only on relentless negative media coverage of Trump in allied countries - especially Britain, and other “NATO partners” - but the “interception of electronic communications from members of [Trump’s] incoming Presidential administration.

The New York Times dubbed the document a “damning and surprisingly detailed account” of Moscow’s “efforts to undermine the American electoral system.” The Washington Post boldly described it as “a remarkably blunt assessment”, and “extraordinary postmortem of a Russian assault on a pillar of American democracy.”

In reality, the ICA offered zero evidence to support any of its bombastic headline conclusions. This glaring deficit was justified on the basis “full supporting information on key elements of [Russia’s] influence campaign” was “highly classified”. Bizarrely, much of the Assessment’s content focused instead on the output of Russian media - both for domestic and international audiences - with no relevance whatsoever to the 2016 election