We don’t know much about the memo compiled by a former M16 official alleging collaboration between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russian government as well as salacious “kompromat” that could be used to blackmail the incoming president. The contents are explosive, but also unverified. The fact that the information was given to the president and key members of Congress, however, is not all that unusual, according to former FBI and CIA officials.

After investigating over the summer, intelligence officials reportedly presented the classified information to President Obama and Trump Friday as a two-page summary attached to a larger report about Russia’s role in the US election. Trump’s senior advisor, Kellyanne Conway, denied the president-elect knew about the report, and Trump has labeled it “fake news.”

But former intelligence officials speaking to VICE News said it’s normal for intelligence briefings to the president and other top officials to contain unverified information like that in the memo, which had been circulating for weeks before BuzzFeed published it in full Tuesday night.

“If you’re a department head, you’re thinking, ‘My boss should know about this before the media gets it,’” said Milan Patel, a former supervisory special agent with the FBI’s cyber division and current managing director of K2 Intelligence’s Cyber Defense practice. “It’s a very natural part of bringing your leadership up to speed. You want to tell them everything you know but also everything you’ve heard.”

The report notably contains errors, among them, that Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, secretly met with the Kremlin in August 2016 in the Czech Republic to arrange compensation for Russian hackers working against Hillary Clinton. Cohen denied he had ever traveled to Prague, and unnamed officials told the Wall Street Journal the FBI found no evidence he had.

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