U.S. officials released a declassified intelligence report on Friday repeating the monumental accusations against the Kremlin that have been circulating in the American media for months.

The New York Times called the document “a damning and surprisingly detailed account of Russia’s efforts to undermine the American electoral system.” The Washington Post wrote that it’s a “remarkably blunt assessment” and “an extraordinary postmortem of a Russian assault on a pillar of American democracy.” According to The Wall Street Journal, U.S. intelligence agencies have supplied the public with “surprisingly detailed findings.”

These assessments by three of America’s most influential newspapers are themselves surprising and remarkable, in light of the fact that the U.S. intelligence community revealed nothing new on Friday, repeating conclusions already publicized by the White House and officials like U.S. National Intelligence Director James Clapper.

The report itself states clearly that “the full supporting information on key elements of [Russia’s] influence campaign” was redacted from the declassified version, meaning that ordinary people like you and me who want to know the specifics of the evidence against Russia are better off reading studies published by cybersecurity companies like ThreatConnect and CrowdStrike, where you’ll find loads of technical data, as well as little motivational tidbits like “If you encounter a BEAR [hacker], you’re doing something right. Don’t back down.”

The most remarkable thing about the government’s assessment released on Friday is that more than a quarter of the report is merely an annex dedicated to the colossal significance of the RT (Russia Today) television network. These seven pages written by the U.S. intelligence community comprise what is perhaps the greatest and most generous Christmas gift in the history of Russian Orthodoxy, which celebrates the birth of Christ on Saturday, Jan. 7.

Thanks to the C.I.A., F.B.I., and N.S.A., Russia Today can count on continued, likely expanded, Kremlin funding.

American intelligence agencies justify their exegesis of RT on the grounds that “some of [their] judgments about Kremlin preferences and intent are drawn from the behavior of Kremlin loyal political figures, state media, and pro-Kremlin social media actors.”

It’s not insane to look to Russian propaganda outlets and Internet trolls, in order to speculate about the Kremlin’s preferences and plans, but there is much that’s unnerving about just how Washington reads the tea leaves of the Russian media. If these are the outlines of the U.S. government’s guesswork on Russia, that’s scary.

For instance, the report (not the annex) stresses that Dmitry Kiselyov, the Kremlin’s so-called “chief propagandist,” has treated Donald Trump sympathetically on his television show, while disparaging the U.S. democratic process. Kiselyov’s broadcasts — which air in Russian, for domestic viewers — are cited as an example of “messaging to Russian audiences” that presumably reveals the Kremlin’s preferences and intentions.

This latter hypothesis is an especially tough sell: how does a television show in Russian for Russians indicate the Kremlin’s intention to meddle in the U.S. democratic system? Every time officials in Washington criticize the failures of Russia’s political system, should intelligence officers in Moscow record this as an admission of intent to undermine Russia?