Politically Short

Bruce Ohr, the former Associate Deputy Attorney General who served as the fourth-highest ranking official in the Justice Department, will testify before the House Judiciary Committee on August 28th, 2018, to answer questions regarding his connections to anti-Trump dossier author Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS.

According to Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., Ohr had over sixty contacts with Christopher Steele going as far back as January of 2016.

As of now, we currently know that Bruce Ohr funneled information from Steele to the FBI after the FBI had terminated Steele as a source for his failure to abide by FBI instructions to avoid contact with the press about his work. Moreover, in December 2017, Ohr was removed from his position as U.S. Associate Deputy Attorney General after it was revealed that he conducted undisclosed meetings with anti-Trump dossier author Christopher Steel and Glenn Simpson, principal of Fusion GPS.

Bruce Ohr’s wife, Nellie Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS and the Ohrs’ connection to the dossier was kept secret for nearly a year after the dossier’s publication. Bruce Ohr even failed to disclose Nellie’s work for Fusion on his annual financial disclosure forms.

What little we know of Nellie Ohr is that she was employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump, is a fluent Russian speaker, has a Ph.D. in Russian history and an apparent CIA affiliation going back at least 20 years.

It’s not surprising that the media refuses to report on this aspect of the investigation.

With President Trump helping to bring the Ohr’s into the spotlight and Bruce’s hearing scheduled in two weeks, the bigger story is starting to come out. On Sunday, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-C.A., explained why the Ohr’s are so central to this investigation. Below is a partial transcript and video from Nunes’ appearance on Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Maria: Mr. Chairman you were just talking about Bruce Ohr and I want to get right to that because he becomes the central figure now in this investigation, the Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed him and we have a date. He’s going to testify in front of Judiciary on August 28. Why is he so central to this story?

Nunes: Well because what’s come out now, Maria, is that he [Ohr] has been the go-between for Christopher Steele. Christopher Steele was terminated as a source, for doing things like talking to the media, and he was working for Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, working for the Clinton campaign. Steele was fired, a lot of this information wasn’t shared with the FISA court especially because of the fact that Christopher Steele was desperate that Donald Trump not become president. After that happened, Bruce Ohr, one of the top lawyers in the department of justice, kept continually meeting and providing information from Christopher Steele to who? The FBI. This is just madness.

The American people need to know it, and I will tell you like I said in the last segment the fact that the media is ignoring this is even more of a reason that we’re going to have to have more information than usual declassified. We’re going to have to have I think an unprecedented amount of information declassified because the media is just not covering this topic, and I’ll just kind of close it with this. Don’t forget that Bruce Ohr’s wife also will have to be interviewed soon, she also was working for Fusion GPS, working for the Clinton campaign. So here you have information 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 the Department of Justice to open up a counter-intelligence investigation into a political campaign that has now included nearly every top official at the DOJ and FBI over the course of the last couple years.

Maria: Right the president has said maybe he would declassify this. What’s wrong with declassifying all of this information so the American people understand exactly what took place? Because you’re right. This is an incredible story and that is why we are doing it every Sunday morning to make sure the American people are informed as far as what went on. Do you think the president will declassify this so that people understand what took place?

Nunes: I think he really has no choice, because I will tell you, you’re going to end up with a situation with half of America including many almost nearly every Republican member of Congress who will have zero confidence in the Department of Justice and the FBI and that just can’t be. We have to have a strong DOJ and a strong FBI that stays out of politics and if we don’t get that soon, I think it’s just going to continue to deteriorate and I think it’s the speaker of the house Paul Ryan said several months ago, the DOJ and the FBI need to decide whether or not they want to be part of the cleanup crew or the coverup crew. So right now, I just want to be clear. They are providing slowly but they are providing documentation and we’re going to have to have all of this information declassified. We really need an investigation into these top level people as to how somebody concocted the idea that it’s okay to take information from one political campaign and use it to open up an investigation on the other political campaign, on somebody else’s opposing political party.

Maria: Right. You’ve said many times on this program that there was zero evidence, official evidence available to launch an investigation into collusion between Donald Trump and the Russians. There was no evidence. It was all based on that unverified dossier. I’ll go one step further in terms of trusting the FBI and the DOJ again. That’s not going to happen until there’s accountability. Will we see prosecutions?

Nunes: The only way there can be accountability is one step at a time and it deals with full and complete transparencies. Full sunlight on as many of the documents that don’t endanger national security. Our committee members have sent a letter to the president, we don’t believe they’re going to jeopardize any sources or methods. I have said many times people are going to be shocked as to what went into a FISA warrant against Carter Page and even more importantly, what did not go into the FISA application, that was not presented to the court involving the information that they had on Carter Page.

As Nunes noted last week, “there is exculpatory evidence that we have seen of classified documents that need to be declassified. The [FISA court] judges should have been presented with this exculpatory evidence that the FBI and DOJ had.”

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