(AUDIO Q&A) I hope you will RETWEET this Q&A on a question I'm often asked: "Will the upcoming, 1,000-page Trump-Russia counterintelligence report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence blow open the Trump-Russia case?" The answer is complicated.
PS/ Those insisting the forthcoming report will incriminate Trump are forgetting the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence already announced in 2019 that their findings on conspiracy are exactly the same as Mueller's. There is no evidence the new report will look beyond Russia.
PS2/ That DNI Ratcliffe—a rabid Trump supporter—would be willing to send back a redacted version of the report to the Senate three days ago seems to suggest he's willing to have a version of the report come out before the election. That virtually assures it is minimally damning.
PS3/ Just so, Sen. Warner has already made clear that the report was prepared by his staff and the staff of his committee—not by anyone within the intelligence community, as I've said many times would be the case. DNI Ratcliffe saw the Senate report for the first time in mid-May.
PS4/ Now comes a reconciliation process between Warner, Rubio and Ratcliffe—following redactions made by the ODNI. But the fact that Warner/Burr drafted—per NBC—an unclassified version of the report they could read on the Senate floor again confirms it's not particularly damning.
PS5/ To be clear, this doesn't mean, if Biden wins in 2020, his ODNI might not, in conjunction with Democrats in Congress, create a cross-branch report on counterintelligence findings involving Russia and other countries that is significantly more damning than the one coming now.
PS6/ But unless we see sudden evidence that—Senator Burr's approval of it notwithstanding—Rubio is trying to block either an unclassified or Senate-floor-ready version of the report, there's no reason to think anyone in the GOP believes the report will be particularly damaging.
PS7/ I'd add that there's no compelling reason to believe that Senate staffers were able to access more and better and more damning counterintelligence evidence on their own than would be available if the intelligence community actually opened its books to produce its own report.
PS8/ That's the main reason I haven't been much focused on this forthcoming Senate report. I expect it'll be approximately as anodyne as the four Senate reports preceding it, and that we will have to wait for a Biden administration truth-and-reconciliation commission to get more.
PS9/ I'd like nothing better than to say that the coming report will be a multinational exposé of the sort I've offered in the Proof series. From the moment I began writing the series, my hope was for the counterintelligence community to do the right thing and reveal what it has.
PS10/ The sad truth is, the intelligence community hasn't acted with transparency on Trump since it lied to the NYT in October '16, telling it Trump had no Russia ties that it knew of. Major-media reporting has been our godsend, instead—and what I've relied upon in my books. /end
