If you're going to declassify something, I would expect at least a document on official letter head, with any level of restricted clearance being crossed out and a declassified stamp over top. Then to give substance, they would need to add the title of this hn post "Russia to use crisis actors to stage a flag annd start was in days" as the content of that document.

In essence it’s the same. You just seem to respect written documents more.

So does the Associated Press it seems, as per the exchange during the press conference.

But yes, I would probably want some form of intelligence briefing being declassified in paper form before pointing the finger at a nuclear adversary. That ol' extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence thing.

Or do you think that some spy in Russia, telephoned a guy in the pentagon, that telephoned a guy in the whitehouse, that setup a press conference and then telephoned a guy to brief him about something he should say, that may or may not help to provoke a war?

Seems a bit far fetched.

No, the reporter explicity said, "It's not the format, it's the content." They were looking for evidence, they didn't care whether it was written or not.

Why did you bring up HN post title? It's not in the briefing, seems to be OP's (quite exaggerated) summary. Price's words: "We don’t know if Russia will necessarily use this or another option in the coming days."

Ok from the first paragraph of the press briefing then, I would expect a document with at least the following:

>Russia is planning to stage fabricated attacks by Ukrainian military or intelligence forces as a pretext for a further invasion of Ukraine.

Sounded like the guy had just heard so much stuff he considered pure bullshit, that he just ran out of suspension of disbelief.

As far as really important stuff (perhaps this isn't a good example?), they could actually just reveal everything, after all having an informed public seems pretty important in a democratic society. Does that ever happen? Get all the secret agents out and just blow the lid? It would have to be going-to-war level stuff though.