So when the President announced -- that is the completion of the [redacted] calls. When the President announced that the United States Government was going to expel Russian diplomats and take the actions to close and to impose sanctions on some of the intelligence leadership in Russia, we obviously were covering very, very closely to see what reaction we would get from the Russians; what are they going to do? So our analysts were watching [redacted] all over the country on the Russians. And so we -- they saw this much more quickly than we normally would, and [redacted].
And then the Intelligence Community, including the FBI, was surprised when the Russians did nothing in response to the expulsion. One of the reasons we were [redacted] was to see, how far will they go in retaliating to us, and then what will we do? And so the last couple days of December and the first couple days of January, all the Intelligence Community was trying to figure out, so what is going on here? Why is this -- why have the Russians reacted the way they did, which confused us? And so we were all tasked to find out, do you have anything [redacted] that might reflect on this? That turned up these calls at the end of December, beginning of January. And then I briefed it to the Director of National Intelligence, and Director Clapper asked me for copies [redacted] which I shared with him.
In the first week of January, he briefed the President and the Vice President and then President Obama's senior team about what we had found and what we had seen to help them understand why the Russians were reacting the way they did. We did not disseminate this [redacted] in any finished intelligence, although our people judged was appropriate, for reasons that I hope are obvious, to have Mr. Flynn's name unmasked. We kept this very close hold, and it was shared just as I described.
