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. presidential election.”

The intelligence community report released in January 2017 assessed with "moderate" to "high" confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin sought to boost then-candidate Donald Trump's 2016 election chances.

The House Intelligence Committee report, released in 2018, was not bipartisan. The GOP-led effort concluded, “The majority of the Intelligence Community Assessment judgments on Russia's election activities employed proper analytic tradecraft," but found the "judgments on Putin's strategic intentions did not.” The Democrats on the panel released their own assessment that said they found "no evidence" to cast doubt on the assessment.

Nunes sent a notification about eight criminal referrals targeting individuals tied to the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, including some that had to do with leaks, in April 2019. The exact content of those referrals has never been publicly disclosed. Nunes said at the time the public may never know who is mentioned in them.

On May 1, Attorney General William Barr said the Justice Department had opened "multiple criminal leak investigations," after which it was revealed he appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham to review possible misconduct by federal law enforcement and intelligence officials in the Russia inquiry.

Nunes said he plans to send more criminal referrals to the Justice Department after the recent declassification of key portions of documents related to the secret surveillance of onetime Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and a DOJ inspector general report that discussed several glaring issues with that process, including the FBI's reliance on British ex-spy Christopher Steele's unverified anti-Trump dossier.

The congressman argued this information never should have been classified in the first place and claimed there is still more "critical information" hiding from public view. Nunes said this is one of the issues Republicans are eager to have fully investigated.