Article snippet: Republicans are on the defensive about their own announcement concluding the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russia's election interference. Members are openly frustrated at what they say is inaccurate media coverage of an alleged split between Rep. MORE during the 2016 election. The apparent division emerged in the hours after Conaway announced that the panel’s report would dispute the intelligence community's official assessment that Putin had sought to intervene on behalf of Trump. Shortly following that announcement, Rep. MORE (R-Fla.) echoed similar sentiments on CNN. But committee Republicans have pushed back on the notion that there is any disagreement about what investigators found. What happened, lawmakers told The Hill, was a case of mixed messaging and garbled reporting on an intelligence concept that is difficult to explain. “I screwed this up by that line in the talking points, created this ruckus — it’s a non-ruckus ruckus,” Conaway told The Hill on Thursday. Although there is evidence that Putin sought to boost Trump’s candidacy, lawmakers say, committee investigators concluded that the small group of intelligence officials who made the assessment in January 2017 did not meet the appropriate evidentiary standard to make that judgment with such certainty. The dispute appears to center around what’s known in intelligence as a “confidence level” — a qualitative measurement given by analysts to convey the scope and quality of the inf... Link to the full article to read more