Around 10 a.m. on a Saturday in August 2018, someone made the extraordinary decision to show a White House staff member a top-secret report written by investigators working for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), which is universally pronounced as “hip C.”

The still-secret, never-released HPSCI report concluded that the Russian government wanted Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump, to win the 2016 election and that then-CIA Director John Brennan had manipulated a January 2017 “Intelligence Community Assessment,” or ICA, which had come to the opposite conclusion.

[…] The former White House staffer did not want to say who brought him into the HPSCI SCIF to read the report. They did so secretly. There is no record of him reading the report.

“About one-quarter of HPSCI staff are former intelligence officers,” he said.

The authors of the 50-page HPSCI report brought it to him and left it with him to read for the next 90 minutes. Asked to recount the exact title, the man wasn’t sure but then added, “It was something like “Staff Report on the January 6, 2017, Intelligence Community Assessment, ‘Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections.’”

“It was clearly something they had put a lot of time into,” he explained. “It was refined and polished. There was a main text. There were sidebars. A sidebar would be a parallel discussion or analysis. This wasn’t just an essay. It was a finished product. It was formatted and footnoted with a cover page.”

[…] Pressed further, he said, “They were pleasant, introverted people. Not political hacks. Professionals. Somewhat wonky and nerdy.”

What the HPSCI staff report showed was that the former CIA Director Brennan had manipulated the ICA.

[…] Why was the report never released?

“My understanding was the HPSCI Chairman at the time, Devin Nunes, was waiting for the Trump administration to release FISA warrants against Trump campaign officials before he released this report. They couldn’t get any traction in getting it cleared by the CIA, and given that it was a Republican administration, they thought the Trump administration could get it out.”

Added the man, “I’m sure there’s a copy [of the HPSCI report] at the CIA. In theory, there are still copies in the HPSCI SCIF.”