I think “shortly before” is a fair interpretation of the following quote: > …'hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of

I think “shortly before” is a fair interpretation of the following quote: > …'hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there's about to be some kind of dump that's similar to that'." > He said the FBI did not warn Facebook about the Biden story in particular - only that Facebook thought it "fit that pattern". The timing (“there’s about to be… [a] dump”) sounds like an important part of the identified pattern, or else it wouldn’t have been mentioned in the quote.