The news about Alexander Smirnov, a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen with murky connections in former Soviet republics, was quite a comedown from what Republican members of Congress were making of the story he had told. His story had implicated President Joe Biden in alleged shady business dealings involving his son Hunter and a Ukrainian firm called Burisma. Republicans striving to find something to be a basis for impeaching President Biden jumped on Smirnov’s tale. “Highly credible,” said House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R-KY). “The most corroborating evidence we have,” stated House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH). House Republican Conference chair Elise Stefanik (R-NY) declared it was evidence of “the biggest political corruption scandal, not only in my lifetime, but I would say the past 100 years.”

Then this supposed bombshell went poof. Smirnov’s story was a fabrication. A federal grand jury indicted Smirnov for lying to the FBI by telling the story. Prosecutors indicated that Smirnov’s apparent motivation for peddling the lie was political, with the added twist that Russian intelligence officials with whom Smirnov had contacts had been involved in disseminating the false tale.

The FBI never had much confidence in Smirnov’s story and assessed—based on analysis of other information and the kind of access that Smirnov did or did not have—that his accusation did not warrant further action. The Bureau warned members of Congress against relying on what he said. This did not stop the impeachment promoters from running with the accusation, nor did it stop a fumbling Jim Jordan, after the indictment of Smirnov was announced, from trying to blame the FBI for ever listening to Smirnov in the first place.

This instance of ignored warnings about the public use of questionable intelligence recalls a similar episode more than twenty years ago, as the George W. Bush administration was selling the idea of an offensive war against Iraq. The episode involved a foreign intelligence report that Iraq had purchased uranium ore from Niger. Analysts at the CIA had serious doubts about the report from the outset. The report’s sourcing was weak. Iraq already had a stockpile of uranium ore and did not need to purchase more, and other information about the uranium mines in question suggested that they could not have been involved in any such sale. The CIA repeatedly warned the Bush White House not to use the report publicly. The warnings included a call from director George Tenet to the deputy national security advisor, as well as a follow-up memo detailing the agency’s reasons for doubting the report’s veracity.

However, administration officials, who were focused on selling an invasion of Iraq, were not deterred. The notion of purchasing uranium had a juicy simplicity that made it more sellable to the public than some of the more technical-sounding aspects of Iraq’s alleged unconventional weapons program. Continued White House pushing to use the report resulted in it being mentioned—free of any expressed doubts or caveats—in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address. This did not stop those administration officials, like Jordan, when he tried to shift the blame on the FBI, from later directing all blame for mistakes about Iraqi weapons programs at the intelligence community.

An obvious common thread in these two instances is that the public promoters of bad information had a strong political or policy motive to do the promotion, shoving standards of truthfulness aside. An associated lesson for the public and the press when being presented with supposed bombshell reports of this nature is to examine the likely motivations of those doing the presenting and to factor that into an appraisal of whether the report is likely valid.

A larger and more basic gap in public understanding also is involved. This concerns a frequent inability to distinguish between, on the one hand, solid information and, on the other hand, reporting that addresses important topics and thus should not be ignored but falls well short of solidity and requires further corroboration and evaluation before becoming a basis for any action.

Much public discourse—involving not just those with a political or policy axe to grind—treats information as either all good or all bad. If seen as good, it is taken to be immediately actionable. If seen as bad, then often either an ill motive or incompetence is ascribed to anyone who did anything with the information other than to immediately discard it.

An example is the discourse about the “Steele dossier,” which routinely gets thrown into the “bad” bin. But Christopher Steele, the retired British intelligence officer who assembled that collection of reporting, never depicted it as anything other than what it actually is: raw, uncorroborated reporting that might be useful as lead information for further investigation but was not by itself in shape to be a basis for public policy. The dossier tells several stories, and the information in it was never likely to be all good or all bad. Some aspects of those stories are true, others are untrue, and still others are as yet unconfirmed and might turn out to be either true or false.

Much of public policy—especially foreign policy, dealing as it does with foreign countries striving to keep their secrets—needs to consider reports that are far from complete or solid. Solidity is often hard to get, and if the issue at hand is important, one cannot afford to peremptorily discard information because it is incomplete, ambiguous, or otherwise of questionable validity. Even squishy reporting that is not patently looney or fraudulent needs to be exploited for anything useful that can be extracted from it, especially by using it as a lead for further inquiry and collection of information.

The federal government has agencies whose job includes doing exactly that. The FBI is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Its main job is to investigate—to try to collect information that eventually will be sound and complete while using as leads whatever scraps, even of questionable veracity, it has to begin with. As the Bureau noted in a letter to Comer warning against running with Smirnov’s tale, “Indeed, the FBI regularly receives information from sources with significant potential biases, motivations and knowledge, including drug traffickers, members of organized crime, or even terrorists.”

The FBI’s investigations into matters involving Russia and Donald Trump exemplify its core mission of using scraps as leads to try to develop firmer information on a matter of high importance to U.S. national security. To this day, there still are questions about Trump’s dealings with Russia that are as disturbing as they are unanswered. For the FBI not to have tried to make investigative use of whatever scraps they had, including Steele’s reporting, in seeking better answers would have been a dereliction of its duty.

Other components in the intelligence community have a similar mission of taking source material that is routinely fragmentary, ambiguous, and often questionable and trying to construct sound, coherent pictures of situations overseas that will aid policymakers in their decisions. The CIA has battalions of analysts whose job is to do that.

The agencies have a responsibility—which they generally discharge well by using a glossary of warnings, caveats, and degrees of confidence—to inform their consumers of the nature of what they provide, ranging from confirmed facts and confidently constructed judgments to reporting that is squishy and uncorroborated but cannot be dismissed out of hand.

The agencies have a responsibility to make available to relevant policymakers in the executive and legislative branches the squishy stuff as well as the good stuff. One reason is that policymakers must consider possibilities and not just certainties, including some possibilities that analysts judge are less likely than others. And judgments may turn out to be wrong.

Discharging this responsibility, unfortunately, entails the possibility of misuse of such material by the consumer. Intelligence agencies are painfully aware of this possibility, having witnessed too many earlier instances of misuse. But ultimately, withholding the material is not an option. And this can lead to the kind of politically inspired mischief that impeachment-promoting Republicans committed with the Smirnov report.

Paul R. Pillar retired in 2005 from a twenty-eight-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier, he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA, covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. His most recent book is Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts U.S. Foreign Policy. He is also a contributing editor for this publication.

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