Facebook has long had a vexed relationship with Donald Trump. It’s based in Silicon Valley, and most of the executives and employees are liberal Democrats. Mark Zuckerberg believes, to his core, that the point of his platform is to make the world more open and connected. Donald Trump’s campaign was built on tribalism—dividing America against the world, and dividing American groups against each other.

At the same time, Facebook aspires to serve the entire country, and the entire world. You can’t make America more connected if you ignore the GOP. And Facebook’s Washington office isn’t stupid: They know which party controls power in the capital, and the company has very little interest in alienating the people who might regulate it.

Facebook has grappled with these tensions repeatedly over the past two years. In no small part because of fears that it would be seen as partisan, it missed signs of the spread of fake news on its platform during the summer of 2016. The desire not to appear partisan may have made it harder for the company to spot the Russian operations in the first place, and it also may have contributed to the company’s phlegmatic attitude while dealing later with congressional investigators. The House and Senate intelligence committees are perceived by many in Silicon Valley as leaky and partisan—and perhaps best kept at a slight distance.

With Mueller’s indictment, according to multiple people at the company, everyone felt that Facebook had done something right. The 35 mentions clearly showed that Facebook had fully cooperated with authorities. Many of the details in the indictment, particularly from pages 25 to 30, which include details of messages sent between private Facebook accounts, were given to Mueller by Facebook. That could have been a good story. But then Rob Goldman decided to weigh in, using a rival platform. He now has 10,500 Twitter followers, but a few fewer friends at work.

On Sunday night, Joel Kaplan, the VP of Global Public Policy at Facebook, put out a statement saying “Nothing we found contradicts the Special Counsel’s indictments. Any suggestion otherwise is wrong.” Roughly translated, that meant, “We asked Rob Goldman to throw his phone in a river.”

At its core, Goldman’s mistake was a familiar one for Silicon Valley: An executive really smart at one thing seemed to think he was really smart at another thing. Goldman surely understands all the ads that Russia’s IRA purchased on the platform. He may have even seen the full dossier of information that Facebook presumably created for Mueller, detailing the private messages and chats cited in the indictment. But no one at Facebook has access to the entirety of information that the Mueller indictment references: including the transfers using PayPal, or the internal emails sent by employees at the IRA. Facebook has long suspected that the NSA somehow compromised the IRA—the first time the company thought about Russian propaganda groups buying ads on the platform came because of a reference in a Time magazine story from an unnamed senior intelligence official—and it seems possible that such work could have informed the Mueller report.

Most importantly, there are still three hypotheses about the intertwined goals held by the purveyors of Russian propaganda. The first one, to which Goldman pointed, is that the intention was merely to sow division. They just wanted Americans to fight. Or, as Goldman put it, “The main goal of the Russian propaganda and misinformation effort is to divide America by using our institutions, like free speech and social media, against us.”

At its core, Goldman’s mistake was a familiar one for Silicon Valley: An executive really smart at one thing seemed to think he was really smart at another thing.

The second, believed by others inside of Facebook to have been most influential, is that the goal was really to weaken Hillary. That’s why the Russians supported Bernie Sanders and then Trump. Like most of the world, Putin expected Hillary to win. And he wanted her to be in a rough spot when she did: fighting off made-up memes about her fraud, her affection for Sharia law, and even her murders.