The July 23rd release is a single, 46-page document, dated 18 September 2020, which seems to have existed in only five copies (the cover sheet is noted "Copy 1 of 5") and was "stored in a limited-access vault at CIA headquarters." It is a critique (apparently for the House Intelligence Committee) of the 5 January 2017 report, "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections," the one we mentioned in our previous post on this subject as the public beginning of the Russia-did-it narrative.

I'll now give you some snips from this new report. But again, you can and should download the original to see it for yourself.

This time I'll set quotations in italics:

(The director of the CIA published three reports which were) substandard – containing information which was unclear, of uncertain origin, potentially biased or implausible – and those became foundational sources for ICA judgments that Putin preferred Trump over Clinton.

One scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports constitutes the only classified information cited to suggest the Putin "aspired" to help Trump win."

Putin's principle motivations… were to… weaken what the Russians considered to be an inevitable Clinton presidency.

Putin held back leaking some compromising material for post-election use against the expected Clinton administration.

The ICA ("Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections") ignored or selectively quoted reliable intelligence reports that challenged – or in some cases undermined – judgments that Putin sought to elect Trump.

The DCIA (Director of the CIA) picked five CIA analysts to write the ICA and rushed its production two weeks before President-Elect Trump was sworn-in. Hurried coordination and limited access to the draft reduced opportunities for the IC to discover misquoting of sources and other tradecraft errors.

The drafters of the ICA did not accurately cite the most critical context statements.

The reports were published after the election on DCIA orders, despite veteran CIA officer judgments that they contained substandard information which was unclear, of uncertain origin, potentially biased, implausible, or in the words of senior operations officers, "odd."

CIA officers also said that DCIA personally directed that two of the most important reports not be formally disseminated when he first learned of them, ostensibly because they were too sensitive to create printed copies. We were unable to obtain a convincing explanation, however, for why DCIA did this, since the CIA has a special reporting channel… whereby sensitive reports are restricted.