Sometimes a piece of news can be both a major revelation and completely unsurprising. Take the recent disclosure, fed to NBC News’s Ken Dilanian by US officials, that much of the “declassified intelligence” given to the public over the course of the Ukraine crisis-turned-war was dubious to nonexistent.

Earlier this week, Dilanian told NBC that the Joe Biden administration’s claims that Russian president Vladimir Putin was considering using biological and chemical weapons in Ukraine was based on less-than-solid evidence, according to three different US officials he talked to. “That was based on declassified intelligence,” said Dilanian. “But we’re also told the intelligence wasn’t very clear about what exactly was going on.” Dilanian also pointed to headline news last month that Russia was requesting military aid from China, something denied by Chinese and Russian officials, as another case of this.

But if Dilanian’s piece is to be trusted, he was actually underselling the news. According to the report, written by Dilanian and three other reporters, those three officials told NBC that “there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine.”