Trump Intelligence Report Merits Caution, Spy Agency Vets Say
At the very least, the document is no hoax: According to CNN and the Guardian, senior intelligence officials presented a two-page summary of its contents to both Trump and President Obama. Trump, for his part, denied the report immediately and furiously. “FAKE NEWS – A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!” the President-elect wrote on Twitter, in a rare all-caps missive.
But those who spent their careers in the intelligence world are reading the report with more tempered skepticism, what ex-CIA analyst Patrick Skinner describes as “interested caution.” He says he’s neither dismissing the report nor taking its claims at face value, but like other intelligence agency alums WIRED spoke to, called it “raw intelligence” that would require far more work before it can be considered useful evidence.
“I imagine a lot more will come out, and much will be nothing and perhaps some of it will be meaningful, and perhaps even devastating,” says Skinner, who now works for the Soufan Group, an intelligence consultancy. But he warns that raw intelligence—information which hasn’t been corroborated or confirmed—like this shouldn’t be released to the public, and is impossible to assess on its own. “One of the reasons why the intelligence community doesn’t release raw or even finished intelligence, to say nothing of a privately funded, untrained…source like in this case, is that people would freak out with the day-to-day drip that might not be anything once it’s placed in context and vetted with multiple sources.”
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