Matt Taibbi’s take:
https://www.racket.news/p/in-brutal-document-release-the-russia?r=5mz1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
“All three reports weren’t just unsourced and unreliable, but discarded fictions pulled out of the CIA’s trash heap. “They manipulated the manipulations,” is how ODNI Deputy Chief of Staff Alexa Henning put it.
The Assessment was written by just five CIA analysts hand-picked by Brennan, but even these most favored lieutenants couldn’t accept the key pieces of evidence. Two of the five went to Brennan to say, “We don’t have direct information that Putin wanted to get Trump elected,” only to be overruled. The same thing happened when members of the group objected to the Steele material, saying it didn’t meet even “basic tradecraft standards.” When confronted on this point, Brennan reportedly said, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?””