This story is all the rage here and elsewhere right now, but honestly it’s likely more of a benefit to Trump that this thing be out there sucking up so much oxygen while his nominees are in hearings.
Just look at the front page headlines around the web.
MSNBC: Trump tweets “are we living in Nazi Germany”
CNN is covered in crap about how he’s calling them fake news.
NBC: Trump holds press conference among firestorm of Russian allegations.
HuffPo: “Nightmare Presser: Defiant on Russia”
Big old distraction, over what? A document that may not be worth the paper it was once printed on, but don’t take my word for it, how about some intelligence experts, everyone loves them around here these days:
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.”
In fact in the words of one the source of this document might be a ‘bullshitting wannabe’:
Some former intelligence staffers are even more dubious. “Bluntly, it looks like an ex-field officer who’s got some interesting sources, but who has no idea how to compile raw HUMINT into usable intelligence,” says Matt Tait, a former staffer of Britain’s GCHQ intelligence agency.
“The key to usable HUMINT is distinguishing the real, highly placed sources from the bullshitting wannabes who pretend they’re highly placed sources by making shit up that fits the public facts,” says Tait. “In this case, the doc gives no indication that the company has done work to rigorously separate the two…and consequently it’s really hard to tell whether any of the info is actually true, or just a very exciting and expensively produced fan-fiction novel.”
I encourage anyone currently buying into what may potentially be a steaming pile of bullshit fabricated out of whole cloth by what may be the worlds best internet troll ever read Wired’s write-up. Which is the source of the quotes above.