Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Thursday sent a letter referring to the intelligence community inspector general a report by Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-CA) on the Obama intelligence community’s 2017 assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump.
In a letter to Acting IC Inspector General Thomas Monheim, Ratcliffe wrote: “…consistent with my obligation to transmit allegations of wrongdoing to your office for review, I am attaching the enclosed Oversight Investigation and Referral regarding concerns with the completion of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election published on 5 January 2017 for your review.”
IntelCommInspectorGeneral.pdf by Kristina Wong
After the 2017 ICA that said Russia intervened in the 2016 election to hurt Hillary Clinton and to help Trump came out, then committee Chairman Nunes and other Republicans on the committee began investigating the assessment, amid allegations that it was politically driven by Obama administration appointees such as then-CIA Director John Brennan — particularly the assessment that Russia wanted to help Trump and not just sow discord.
A senior intelligence official familiar with Nunes’s report told Breitbart News:
There are a number of things in the referral that the ICIG will likely be interesting, in particular Obama-Biden era political appointees who overruled career intelligence officials who raised concerns about some things being included in the ICA. Ratcliffe made the right call sending this to the ICIG.
Ratcliffe said in the letter the referral was first sent to the ICIG in December 2018 by Republicans, who then controlled the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He wrote that since then, the office of the DNI received “numerous requests” from senior oversight officials for the ICIG to review whether “all portions of the aforementioned ICA adhered to proper analytic tradecraft.”
Ratcliffe also requested that Nunes’s report undergo a formal declassification review. “I am committed to facilitating transparency that serves the public interest while balancing the imperative to protecting sources and methods,” he wrote.
Ratcliffe recently sent about 1,000 documents to U.S. Attorney John Durham for use in his investigation on wrongdoing in the Obama administration’s probe into the Trump campaign.
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