RUSH EXCERPT:
RATCLIFFE: “Well, it was a great privilege for the president to ask me to serve as the director of national intelligence. Not only was I qualified for that position but more importantly, Maria I was committed to an intelligence community that doesn’t unmask people for political reasons, or doesn’t use garbage like the Steele dossier as part of the official intelligence community assessment and I was committed to getting answers to why that had been happening in the Obama Administration and that made a lot of people nervous, so I certainly expected because of that, a wave of the false media stories that came and I expected there to be a lot of senators saying I was too political. I just didn’t expect some of those senators to be Republicans who support that I needed so yeah there is a toxic environment that makes it a difficult place to go to work.”