A highly-anticipated declassified US intelligence report, aimed to prove that Russia supported Donald Trump, has turned out to be a huge embarrassment. The annex that contained factual material that was thought to provide evidence of RT influencing the American public was compiled in December 2012, right after the reelection of Barack Obama.

The report focuses on television shows and interviews that took place four years before Trump was elected, and well before he was even a politician.

In Annex A of the report, intelligence agencies claim that “Kremlin's TV Seeks To Influence Politics, Fuel Discontent in US.” Buried at the bottom of that page is a note stating, “This annex was originally published on 11 December 2012 by the Open Source Center, now the Open Source Enterprise.”

Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections Intelligence Report

The report notes that two RT shows, Breaking the Set and Truthseeker, focused on criticism of US. The problem is, both of these shows were off air before the 2016 election season began.

The report goes on to detail programming in 2012 about voting booth irregularities, which, again, would have been during Obama’s campaign. Despite being an old report, the topic became largely relevant once again during the Democratic primaries when voters found themselves purged from voting rolls, and hundreds of thousands of ballots went uncounted.

Perhaps most shocking of all, the dastardly RT network dared to host third party debates, as they were not allowed participation in the main debates.

“In an effort to highlight the alleged ‘lack of democracy’ in the United States, RT broadcast, hosted, and advertised third party candidate debates and ran reporting supportive of the political agenda of these candidates. The RT hosts asserted that the US two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a sham."

Apparently, the intelligence communities do not agree that some of the people they serve may not fit perfectly into the two neat and tidy political boxes of Republicans and Democrats.

The report states that the network aired a documentary on Occupy Wall Street, an obviously left-wing movement, in 2012. Again, this was the year Obama was elected, so perhaps the Russians actually won HIM the presidency.

They presented evidence that Russian media often reports on infringements of civil liberties, police brutality, and drone use. While these issues are all popular topics of discussion in left-leaning media, RT’s reporting in 2012 was clearly part of a long-running plot to elect Trump, right?

“RT has also focused on criticism of the US economic system, US currency policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the US national debt. Some of RT's hosts have compared the United States to Imperial Rome and have predicted that government corruption and ‘corporate greed’ will lead to US financial collapse,” the report notes. It is unclear if they will next name Bernie Sanders as a Russian spy.

It gets worse, as the report details how RT has the gall to report on fracking, while “highlighting environmental issues and the impacts on public health.”

Those monsters.

In a bizarre turn of events, US intelligence now presents this report, compiled just after the reelection of Barack Obama, as ‘proof’ of Russia pushing Donald Trump’s candidacy. However, if the report is true and RT the Almighty was swinging votes in 2012, the only beneficiary of the coverage was the now-outgoing president of the United States, who won a landslide victory over Republican Mitt Romney. Four years ago Trump was not thought of as a politician and it remains a mystery how RT’s 2012 coverage could propel him. A mystery, that even a classified version of the report would have a hard time explaining.