PLANNED INSIGNIFICANCE:

Two aspects of the report's release strike me as particularly unfortunate. First, the sections of the report that could have been useful are overshadowed by the overtly political passages and conclusions. The report includes informative statistics regarding the prevalence of Russia's social media presence as it intended to affect the election and American public discourse. The allegation that the intelligence community did not provide defensive counterintelligence briefings to the Trump campaign are concerning and deserve greater scrutiny. [...]

Second, it is fairly obvious that this report was rushed to publication. A more meaningful way to write a report to inform the public would have been an unclassified report accompanied by a classified annex. Instead, the public is presented with a heavily redacted document, which in some cases includes a visible heading with all of following explanatory text redacted. As an exercise in transparency, it falls far short. The majority places blame with the intelligence community for over-redacting--but as someone who has been involved in this type of process, I know that working through classification review is a tedious undertaking. It takes time, patience and hard work by a team of people across different agencies. When redaction is involved in declassifying a document at this level of sensitivity and significance, it requires the engagement of decision-makers at the highest levels. Given how this report reads, I find it hard to draw any conclusion other than that the majority leadership was apparently not willing to invest that effort, even if a better, more informative report could have been produced at a later date. The rush job is evident even in the redactions present: On several pages there are incorrect classification marks, indicating a level of carelessness that comes from pressure to finish and disregard for the potential harmful consequences to national security of making mistakes. More significantly, Chapter 2, entitled "Russia Attacks the United States," is mostly redacted.

The report appears to have been issued based on an incomplete investigation, though the statistics sound substantial: Over 70 individuals were interviewed and over 300,000 documents obtained. But key witnesses to the Trump Tower meeting were not interviewed. Very few of the interviews that were conducted are referenced explicitly. Some witnesses did not cooperate. The report does not contain a list of witnesses. The lack of cooperation by certain witnesses may not have been the fault of the committee, but the report itself does not seem to acknowledge how non-cooperation may have affected the committee's investigation and its ability to draw definitive conclusions. The report also does not explain what specific documents were requested and which documents were relied on to draw conclusions. Although the investigation considered Russian social media influence efforts, there is no information in the report to suggest the majority explored whether foreign money was used to influence the election.

The gratuitous political sections of the report hurt its credibility as an intelligence oversight review. These include allegations of untruthfulness by the prior Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, along with a diversion regarding the Clinton campaign and its now well-known role in funding Fusion GPS activities. Clapper has been used by political players of all stripes over the past several years as a punching bag. In this case, he is alleged to have provided information concerning the Trump Tower transition intelligence briefing, to the media. There is no credible allegation he provided classified information to those unauthorized to receive it--and in any event, aside from the president, the director of national intelligence is the chief classification authority in the executive branch and is empowered to make independent declassification decisions.

But nowhere is the politicization of the committee's work more evident than the extent to which the investigation apparently was sidetracked by the "unmasking" issue. The report includes a listing of a significant amount of correspondence that took place between the committee and the executive branch related to the unmasking issue. This contrived scandal, and the committee majority's central role in creating it, has undermined the committee's credibility.

The best thing that might be said about the report is that it perhaps will quickly become irrelevant.

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