When Pat is saying something outrageous, you know when you yell at the TV? I get to yell at him in person. I get to yell at the TV and it hears me. - Rachel Maddow

The umbrella assertion made by Team B — and the most inflammatory — was that the previous National Intelligence Estimates “substantially misperceived the motivations behind Soviet strategic programs, and thereby tended consistently to underestimate their intensity, scope, and implicit threat.” Soviet military leaders weren’t simply trying to defend their territory and their people; they were readying a First Strike option, and the US intelligence community had missed it. What led to this “grave and dangerous flaw” in threat assessment, according to Team B, was an overreliance on hard technical facts, and a lamentable tendency to downplay “the large body of soft data.” This “soft” data, the ideological leader of Team B, Richard Pipes, would later say, included “his deep knowledge of the Russian soul.

The Ingalls defense team decried the prosecution as a “witch hunt” and portrayed the celebrity aviatrix as a sort of aeronautical Joan of Arc: righteous and inspirational.

"Well, they got caught of course. The whole thing was so dunderheaded, how could they not? By November 1986, Reagan's "Secret Dealings with Iran" had supplanted the 1986 midterm election results on the front page of Time magazine."