When Republicans, in early 2018, first questioned Ohr’s connections to Steele, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee sought to minimize the connection, insisting he only worked as an informer for the FBI after Steele was fired by the FBI in November 2016.
Ohr’s extensive testimony also undercuts one argument that House Democrats sought to make last year. Those he briefed included Andrew Weissmann, then the head of DOJ’s fraud section Bruce Swartz, longtime head of DOJ’s international operations, and Zainab Ahmad, an accomplished terrorism prosecutor who, at the time, was assigned to work with Lynch as a senior counselor.Īhmad and Weissmann would go on to work for Mueller, the special prosecutor overseeing the Russia probe. He said in August 2016 - nearly two months before the FISA warrant was issued - that he was asked to conduct a briefing for senior Justice officials. He then was referred to the agents working Russia counterintelligence, including Peter Strzok, the now-fired agent who played a central role in starting the Trump collusion probe.īut Ohr’s contacts about the Steele dossier weren’t limited to the FBI. Ohr divulged his first contact with the FBI was on July 31, 2016, when he reached out to then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and FBI attorney Lisa Page. “I also told the FBI that my wife worked for Fusion GPS or was a contractor for GPS, Fusion GPS.” “I didn’t know they were employed by the DNC but I certainly said yes that they were working for, you know, they were somehow working, associated with the Clinton campaign,” he answered. When asked if he knew of any connection between the Steele dossier and the DNC, Ohr responded that he believed the project was really connected to the Clinton campaign.
The then-senior Department of Justice (DOJ) official briefed both senior FBI and DOJ officials in summer 2016 about Christopher Steele’s Russia dossier, explicitly cautioning that the British intelligence operative’s work was opposition research connected to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and might be biased. When the annals of mistakes and abuses in the FBI’s Russia investigation are finally written, Bruce Ohr almost certainly will be the No.
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