The Trump administration in recent weeks has released a series of reports intended to undermine the conclusion reached by intelligence agencies before President Trump’s first term that Russia had favored his candidacy in 2016 and sought to improve his chances of winning.
That assessment, an unclassified version of which was made public in January 2017, has long infuriated Mr. Trump. In disclosing the reports, he and his team are proclaiming that President Barack Obama and his team torqued the intelligence analysis process to deliberately discredit Mr. Trump’s election.
The administration has coupled that case with overheated and attention-grabbing claims. Mr. Trump has accused Mr. Obama of treason, and his top officials have made criminal referrals about national security officials under Mr. Obama — all as the administration is trying to distract supporters who are angry about its broken promise to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Still, even if the administration’s use of the reports is wildly overstated, some of the information has not been made public before. It provides some messy details about how the intelligence community assessment was hurriedly produced during Mr. Obama’s final months in office.
