Officials were aghast.. Why, just show how corrupt the GOP is....

Intel chief releases Russian disinfo on Hillary Clinton that was rejected by bipartisan Senate panel

Former top officials were aghast at the move by John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence.

By ANDREW DESIDERIO and DANIEL LIPPMAN

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Tuesday declassified a Russian intelligence assessment that was previously rejected by Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee as having no factual basis, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

The extraordinary disclosure, released to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) earlier Tuesday, rankled Democrats, who said the move effectively put Russian disinformation into the public sphere in order to boost President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about the government’s efforts to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election.

“It’s very disturbing to me that, 35 days before an election, the director of national intelligence would release unverified Russian rumint,” or rumor intelligence, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) told reporters.

And several former senior intelligence officials described Ratcliffe’s move as incendiary and irresponsible, given the manner in which he was publicly releasing unverified information that originated from a foreign adversary.

The assessment claims that Hillary Clinton, then a Democratic candidate for president, personally approved an effort “to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians' hacking of the Democratic National Committee.” But in his letter to Graham, Ratcliffe noted that the U.S. intelligence community “does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.”

The Senate Intelligence Committee issued five reports on Russia’s sweeping effort to meddle in the 2016 election to boost Trump, ranging across thousands of pages. The panel was made aware of that allegation early on in its investigation, and quickly dismissed it, the sources said.

“I’m very, very proud of the bipartisan work of the Intelligence Committee — three and a half years, five volumes — and that work speaks for itself,” Warner said.

According to Ratcliffe, former CIA Director John Brennan briefed former President Barack Obama on the Russian assessment, which included the allegation that Clinton approved the plan to tie Trump to the hack of the DNC after it was proposed by one of her foreign policy advisers.

Asked about Ratcliffe’s claims, Nick Merrill, a spokesperson for Clinton, said in a text message that the allegations were “baseless bullshit.“

Nick Shapiro, Brennan’s former deputy chief of staff at the CIA, said Ratcliffe “should be ashamed of his blatant politicization of his position.”

After receiving pushback against the declassified material, Ratcliffe said in a statement: “To be clear, this is not Russian disinformation and has not been assessed as such by the Intelligence Community. I’ll be briefing Congress on the sensitive sources and methods by which it was obtained in the coming days.”

Graham responded to his critics later Tuesday, saying that the veracity of the Russian intelligence assessment was irrelevant.

“I’m not saying whether it’s true or not,” Graham told reporters. “I’m asking Democrats, do you give a damn whether the FBI investigated it, or do you just care only about investigating Trump?”

When pressed on why he released the information even though it was unverified, Graham called it “the ultimate double standard.”

“They took the whole damn country through hell for two and a half years — and is it far-fetched to believe that the Clinton campaign would do something like this after Christopher Steele?” Graham said referring to the author of an unverified dossier of claims about Trump’s connections to Russia.

A former senior intelligence official said it was “a surprising choice to release this information — that is not new and that seems unconfirmed — now and in an unclassified letter,” adding: “I don’t know what good purpose is served.”

It has long been known that the Russians were trying to stir up false narratives about Clinton through similar avenues.

Another former senior intelligence official said Brennan would frequently brief Obama on Russia’s actions regardless of whether it was about Trump or Clinton, adding that Brennan also wanted to “demonstrate the extent of the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to collect against Russia.”

In recent days, Trump’s allies have been dripping out several disclosures related to the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and other information aimed at denigrating Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

Graham’s committee will hear from former FBI Director James Comey on Wednesday as part of that sweeping GOP-led probe. Graham also announced on Tuesday that former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe will testify before the panel next week. McCabe agreed to appear voluntarily, according to an aide. McCabe’s lawyer said earlier Tuesday that he was being denied access to his old files that he says are necessary for him to prepare for his testimony.

The president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was among those on the right who spotlighted Tuesday’s disclosure, writing on Twitter: “The Russia hoax was Hillary’s plan, and the Obama-Biden White House was briefed on it.”