Here are my top four unknowns as I read this story:

1) Trump team communications with the Russian government before the election

Did anyone in the Trump orbit—intermediaries, campaign staff, family, confidants—know that the reported information was in the hands of the Russian government before the election? Did anyone in the Trump orbit communicate with Russian government officials before the election as the documents allege? (Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, for example, was not in Prague in August 2016, when the documents allege he was there meeting with Kremlin officials.) If anyone else in Trump’s orbit was, were these new allegations the subject of any communications?

2) Whether the FBI screwed up

What did the FBI do once it got the memos in August 2016, when reports say the former MI6 agent first approached an FBI official in Rome? Who took what steps, and why? Why didn't the public hear anything about this matter until five months after the FBI received the memos?

CNN does not report on when exactly the FBI in Washington got the information; only that the Rome contact took place in August. So it is possible the FBI was slow in reacting to the initial “over the transom” communication in Rome. I’d like to know the precise timeline of activity from the point of first contact to better understand whether the bureau should have been moving with greater effort and urgency on a matter of such significance. Four possibilities:

a) Organizational fragmentation. The FBI is highly decentralized into 56 field offices, with a history of left hand/right hand coordination problems—which explains why, before 9/11, three different field offices each had clues about the plot, but nobody knew what the others knew, so more concerted action was never taken. Was this another case of coordination problems impeding success?

b) Cultural pathologies. FBI culture is still rooted in crime-fighting, which means it's slow and careful, oriented toward collecting evidence for a court after something bad has already happened. An intelligence culture, by contrast, is focused on prevention, speed, and integration—pulling and weaving together threads as fast as possible to prevent disaster.

c) Misjudgment. FBI Director James Comey misjudged when and with whom to share this information. We've seen this movie before.

d) Degree of difficulty. The FBI didn’t do anything wrong. The investigation was hard—getting greater confidence and protecting sources and methods took time.

3) Is the two-page intelligence report officials provided to Trump and Obama, which in part summarizes the longer set of memos compiled by the former MI6 agent and made public by Buzzfeed, primarily aimed at the past or the future?

Does the revelation that the Russians have this supposedly embarrassing information (whether it is true or false) suggest an ongoing risk that the president-elect could be pressured by a foreign power into taking actions that are not in the best interests of the United States? One key lesson in intelligence: Information need not be true to be damaging.