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Washington:
US intelligence chief John Ratcliffe on Sunday defended his transfer to finish in-person election safety briefings to Congress, blaming a “pandemic” of leaks from lawmakers.
The Director of National Intelligence wrote to high lawmakers from each events within the House and Senate intelligence committees on Friday explaining the change.
The announcement sparked accusations from senior Democrats that the administration was overlaying up Russian assist for President Donald Trump’s re-election bid.
Ratcliffe voiced frustration over leaks from a counterintelligence briefing to Congress a month in the past informing lawmakers that China, Russia and Iran had been all looking for to intervene.
“And yet, within minutes of that… a number of members of Congress went to a number of different publications and leaked classified information,” Ratcliffe informed Fox News.
He stated the leakers aimed to “create a narrative that simply isn’t true, that somehow Russia is a greater national security threat than China.”
“I’m going to continue to keep Congress informed. But we have had a pandemic of information being leaked out of the intelligence community. And I’m going to take the measures to make sure that that stops,” he added.
The transfer comes two months forward of the overall election, with Trump enjoying down the specter of overseas interference, which he says is being politicized by the Democrats.
“I don’t mean to minimize Russia — they are a serious national security threat — but day in, day out the threats that we face from China are significantly greater,” Ratcliffe stated.
“And anyone that sees intelligence knows that, and anyone who says otherwise is just politicizing intelligence for their own narrative.”
The briefings will nonetheless be given in writing however House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff stated lawmakers had been successfully being stripped of the power to query what they had been being informed.
“That doesn’t make any sense unless the goal is not to allow members of Congress, the representatives of the American people, to ask questions,” the senior Democrat informed CNN.
“It is an illogical inconsistency to say ‘We’re going to put it on paper so it can’t’ leak rather than speak to the Congress — that doesn’t make any sense,” he informed CNN.
He accused the White House of pushing a false narrative that Russian election interference to assist Trump was “no different than other countries are doing.”
The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee earlier in August launched essentially the most detailed report back to date on Russian interference in 2016.
It accused the Trump marketing campaign of welcoming Moscow’s assist, and set out new data on contacts between Russian intelligence officers and Trump’s inside circle.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV workers and is printed from a syndicated feed.)
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