On Friday, the director of national intelligence released a report accusing the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, of directly interfering in the US presidential election with the aim of undermining Hillary Clinton and helping Donald Trump. While most of the main conclusions had already been anonymously leaked to journalists either before or after the election, the report represents an open declaration by the CIA, FBI and NSA that a foreign power played a role in securing the president-elect’s victory.

The DNI report has come in for some criticism, and not only from Trump’s defenders. Kevin Rothrock, an editor for the Moscow Times, has a good summary of its shortcomings, which include inaccurate statements about Russian politics and a bizarre overemphasis on the role of RT, the Kremlin-controlled media network. “America’s case against the Kremlin suffers from some major flaws that should be acknowledged,” he writes, “even by individuals who argue reasonably that the Russian government likely used hackers to attack and undermine democratic institutions in the US.”

These flaws may best be understood as a result of growing panic within the US intelligence community. Trump is less than two weeks away from taking office, and he’s already pledging to pare down the CIA and attacking the agency frequently on Twitter. The same day the report was released, the agency’s former director James Woolsey quit Trump’s transition team, former acting director Michael J Morell denounced Trump in a New York Times op-ed and NBC aired an interview with former director Leon Panetta that also harshly criticized Trump. There is no precedent for this kind of open clash between an incoming president and the intelligence community.

Given that many current CIA officials reasonably fear for their jobs, the report’s sloppiness isn’t all that surprising. Nor is the lack of major new information, since most of the key details had already been leaked, and the report’s significance lies mainly in the agencies putting them on the record.

What is surprising is how ineffectual the report is proving to be as a bombshell.

Depending on one’s perspective, this could be seen as either reassuring or concerning. On the one hand, it’s probably healthy for democracy that the CIA did not make a more concerted attempt to release this information before the election and has not taken any kind of radical steps to block Trump’s inauguration since. On the other hand, assuming the report’s main conclusion is basically correct, it means the US government, including the CIA, is about to fall under the control of a dangerous buffoon whose election was facilitated by a hostile foreign power – and that the intelligence community saw this coming and completely failed to prevent it.

As CIA sources told the Washington Post last month, Barack Obama met with congressional leaders and top intelligence officials in September to discuss publicly holding Russia accountable for hacking the Democratic National Committee. The Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, refused to give this announcement his blessing, regarding it as a politicized use of intelligence before the election. At the time, Obama, like most observers, had good reason to believe Clinton would prevail in November, and thus refrained from personally alerting the American public to Russia’s role and from taking serious steps to counter it.

This was an understandable, and in many respects admirable, decision. It was also, with the benefit of hindsight, a fatal error. There is no preventing Trump from taking office at this point, and while it’s impossible to know whether releasing better information about Russia’s role sooner might have made a difference, we do know that the American people were not fully informed about the dangers of electing a compromised candidate.

For that matter, there is reason to believe Clinton’s campaign was deliberately undermined by the FBI director’s baseless innuendo about her emails a week before election day. Politicized information, both from the FBI and Russia, was used against Clinton, while the White House held its fire on potentially more damaging information about Trump, out of some combination of respect for norms and overconfidence about Clinton’s chances.

Now Trump will take control over the CIA, and he will want revenge on everyone who tried to make Russia’s role public. The agency that refrained from abusing its power domestically under Obama could easily be turned into an instrument of abuse under the new administration.

And while the accusations about Trump’s connection to Russia are now public, they are too late and too unsubstantiated to fully persuade the American people of the danger we now find ourselves in. Americans who want to stop Trump are going to have to find a better way.