Devin Nunes (Credit: public domain)
“A top Republican said a criminal referral sent to the Justice Department last year relates to the 2017 intelligence community assessment on Russian election interference.
Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, spoke about the assessment on Tuesday after the Senate intelligence panel released its 158-page bipartisan report defending the assessment that was released in the waning days of the Obama administration.
The California congressman told Fox Business host Lou Dobbs that it was “suspect” the U.S. intelligence community put it together in a matter of several weeks, at the behest of former President Barack Obama. Referring to what he called “Obama’s dossier,” Nunes noted that his panel, when he was chairman, determined the “tradecraft was not up to snuff” and said he stands by his determination in the face of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s much different conclusion.
The lead GOP investigator revealed that one of the several criminal referrals he sent to the Justice Department last year, which were related to the Trump-Russia investigation, had to do with the intelligence community assessment. He said it focuses on “whether or not intelligence was manipulated for political purposes.”
Nunes’s assertions run counter to what the Senate intelligence panel wrote in its report. The heavily redacted report said Senate investigators found no evidence of political pressure to reach a specific conclusion and determined the assessment by the CIA, FBI, and NSA “presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S.