President Trump pulled no punches about the latest revelations concerning Obama administration associate deputy attorney general Bruce Ohr.
Trump in an August 12 tweet quoted Rep. Darrell Issa's (R-CA 49th District) assertion that there is strong evidence of a Department of Justice plot to keep him out of the White House:
Issa, appearing on the Fox News program, "Fox & Friends," said of Ohr:
"What we want to know is, how could somebody, any attorney but particularly a high-ranking deputy in the Department of Justice, how could they ethically not disclose these conflicts and contacts. You know, the word bias gets thrown around all the time, so let's move past the question of can you prove bias. Can you prove unethical behavior? On its face, that's what we have.
"Failure to disclose, contacts that shouldn't have happened, his own conflict because of his wife. But clearly, these contexts that make it seem like the Department of Justice had a program designed to keep Donald Trump from becoming president."
Just one day earlier, Trump had tweeted:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1028347518822825984
Improper contacts
Ohr, the fourth-highest-ranked official in former president Barack Obama's Department of Justice, met repeatedly with former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, who compiled the infamous Trump Dossier, which was produced by Fusion GPS.
Judicial Watch notes of Ohr:
The House Intelligence Committee memo released by Chairman Devin Nunes on February 2 says that [Ohr's wife] Nellie Ohr was “employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump” and that Bruce Ohr passed the results of that research, which was paid for by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign, to the FBI. The “salacious and unverified” dossier was used to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) surveillance warrant to spy on [Trump adviser] Carter Page.
In other words, a high-ranking member of Democrat President Obama's Justice Department was able to use material paid for by a Democratic presidential campaign to get the FBI to spy on the opposing Republican presidential campaign.
Bruce Ohr
Even after the FBI had determined that Steele's dossier was most likely politically motivated and cut ties with him, Bruce Ohr continued to meet with the paid Clinton operative in his capacity as associate deputy attorney general.
Pushing a Hillary narrative at DOJ
Trump counsel Jay Sekulow said of the Ohr-Steele-Ohr entanglement:
"His wife happens to work for Fusion GPS, who happens to be retained to put together the dossier with Chris Steele. And Chris Steele happens to be talking to the FBI and to Bruce Ohr, the number four at the Justice Department. Christopher Steele gets fired for leaking information. Yet Bruce Ohr continues the ongoing dialogue."
Former deputy assistant attorney general Robert Driscoll, appearing on Fox News host Laura Ingraham's program, said of this relationship:
"Some people, you know, maintain contact with colleagues even after they're cut off or something like that, but where his wife had an interest in the Fusion GPS research getting pushed, the fact that Ohr is the one that was involved in this is a little bit disturbing."
James Trusty, a former Justice Department prosecutor, appearing on the same program, was astonished by Ohr's actions.
"I was with DOJ 17 years and seven in D.C. And I can't for the life of me figure out any good explanation for why Bruce, who I know, was sitting down with a decommissioned informant. And then to add to that, that the FBI had people there writing up 302 reports," Trusty said.
Revealing that "[t]he FBI recently turned over to us 70 pages of heavily redacted records about Christopher Steele," Judicial Watch declared:
These newly released documents show the shady, cash-based relationship the Obama FBI had with… Steele. The anti-Trump Russia “investigation” had Christopher Steele at its center, and his misconduct was no impediment to using information from his Russia intelligence collaborators to spy on the Trump team. The corruption and abuse is astonishing.
Calling it collusion
Congressional investigators are preparing to give the Ohr revelations a much closer look.
The Hill reports House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte "is preparing subpoenas for Justice Department (DOJ) official Bruce Ohr, his wife Nellie Ohr and Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, according to two congressional sources familiar with the matter."
Meanwhile, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, appearing on Fox News's "Sunday Morning Futures" program, flat-out accused the Hillary Clinton campaign of working hand in glove with Obama's Justice Department and the FBI against the Trump campaign.
"So here you have information [the Steele dossier] flowing from the Clinton campaign from the Russians, likely I believe was handed directly from Russian propaganda arms to the Clinton campaign, fed into the top levels of the FBI and Department of Justice to open up a counter-intelligence investigation into a political campaign that has now colluded [with] nearly every top official at the DOJ and FBI over the course of the last couple years."
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