THE TROUBLEMAKER

RUSSIAN PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN HAS always been a night owl, holding meetings into the early hours of the morning. He’s also the proprietor of several Twitter accounts. So it’s possible that early Moscow time on Jan. 4, 2017, he saw the following tweet from President-elect Donald Trump pop up on his screen, complaining about an apparent delay in the release of the U.S. intelligence report on Russian meddling in the 2016 election: “The ‘Intelligence’ briefing on so-called ‘Russian hacking’ was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!”

At that moment, as it happens, the final highly classified report sat, printed and ready, in the office of the principal intelligence analyst overseeing the investigation. And neither Putin nor Trump was going to like the conclusion. The document represented the consensus opinion of the heads of the U.S. intelligence community, the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security that Putin had engaged in a broad, intentional influence operation against the November vote, according to several senior intelligence and Administration officials.

The evidence contained in the report was so highly classified that not even the analyst’s assistant would be allowed to package it for hand delivery across the river to President Barack Obama at the White House the following day. Three separate versions were to be distributed over the coming days: one top-secret, highly restricted version that included signals intelligence and other sources and methods; a less classified document for Congress and agency officials; and a third, declassified version for release to the public. And once those findings became public, say the senior intelligence and Administration officials, a whole new round of political recriminations would ensue.

In fact, the slowdown in the report’s release was the result of the White House trying to manage the