President-elect Donald Trump will be briefed on the report`s findings on Friday in New York.
"I think the public should know as much about this as possible," Clapper said, cautioning that "sensitive and fragile sources and methods" included in the report prevent him from speaking freely about it.
Pressed on the implications of Russian cyberattacks in the 2016 presidential election, Clapper said it was not for the intelligence community to characterize Russian cyberassaults as an act of war.
"I think it is a very heavy policy call that I don`t believe the intelligence community should make," he said. "But it certainly would carry, in my view, great gravity."
He warned about the danger of responding in kind to a cyberassault, saying the issue is "not knowing the counterretaliation." The report will deal with the best practices for defenses, he said, rather than counterassaults.
Today`s hearing highlighted the divide between Congress and President-elect Trump over Russia and President Vladimir Putin. No Republicans on the committee appeared to willing to embrace Trump`s doubt that the highest levels of the Russian government were involved in directing hacks into computers of Democratic National Committee officials and Hillary Clinton campaign staffers. And there was bipartisan disdain for WikiLeaks founder and fugitive computer activist Julian Assange, who denied that Russia was the source of the campaign-related documents the site published and whom Trump appears to have embraced.
Trump tweeted recently, "Julian Assange said `a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta` - why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!"
Clapper testified today that his confidence that Russia played a direct role in the hacks is "very high."
According to Justin Harvey, a cybersecurity expert who works at Accenture, it appears the Russians planted software in DNC computers to send information to Russia.
"We saw the Cyrillic alphabet being used in the compiler. We saw the level of complexity of the malware is not your run-of-the-mill random cybercriminal that perhaps sits in their mother`s basement," he told ABC News. "It was very much nation-state level, very complex code that was being utilized."
Clapper`s testimony comes as news broke overnight that Trump is considering plans to reform America`s top intelligence agencies, including a restructuring of Clapper`s office.
This morning Trump spokesman Sean Spicer denied those reports, and Trump tweeted about them, saying the media want to make him appear to dislike the intelligence community, when in fact, he said, he is a "big fan."
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