A scandal which began before the 2016 election was even held has just exploded, at least if a bombshell report from the watchdog group Judicial Watch is accurate. The organization has been diligently unraveling the facts around Fusion GPS, and what they recently found is jaw-dropping.
Fusion GPS, of course, is the “opposition research” firm which was contracted by the DNC to dig up dirt on Trump in the run-up to the election. The company is linked to the infamous dossier containing scandalous — and thoroughly debunked — claims about the president, but the controversy is much wider than just those papers.
It now appears that someone working for Fusion GPS was purposely and frequently collaborating with a deputy attorney general within the Obama administration, sending anti-Trump material in a way that was certainly unethical if not completely illegal.
The Obama-era official is Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, and the anti-Trump figure working for Fusion GPS was his wife.
“[A] series of ‘Hi Honey’ emails from Nellie Ohr to her high-ranking federal prosecutor husband and his colleagues raise the prospect that Hillary Clinton-funded opposition research was being funneled into the Justice Department during the 2016 election through a back-door marital channel,” explained veteran investigative journalist John Solomon for The Hill.
“Ohr has admitted to Congress that, during the 2016 presidential election, she worked for Fusion GPS — the firm hired by Democratic nominee Clinton and the Democratic National Committee to perform political opposition research,” the journalist said.
That kind of research is often used by political campaigns against their opponents, and is not by itself off limits. But Judicial Watchuncovered 339 emails which reveal that Nellie Ohr likely crossed the line by using her marriage as a political tool, and sending pages of anti-Trump research directly to official Department of Justice email accounts.
“They clearly show that Ohr sent reams of open-source intelligence to her husband, Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, and on some occasions to at least three DOJ prosecutors: Lisa Holtyn, Ivana Nizich and Joseph Wheatley,” Solomon said.
“Such overt political content flowing into the email accounts of a DOJ charged with the nonpartisan mission of prosecuting crimes is jarring enough. It raises additional questions about potential conflicts of interest when it is being injected by a spouse working as a Democratic contractor trying to defeat Trump,” he continued.
But the scandal is deeper than just emails. Nellie and Bruce Ohr apparently had key roles in pushing the debunked Trump dossier and the false narrative that the future president was colluding with Russia.
“For instance, just 24 days after the anti-Trump screed was emailed, both Ohrs met in Washington with British intelligence operative Christopher Steele,” Solomon said. “She said she learned that Steele had concerns that he hoped the DOJ or FBI would investigate, with help from her husband.”
And that appears to be exactly what happened.
“The next day, Bruce Ohr used his official DOJ position to go to then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe with Steele’s allegations (later to become known as the Steele dossier), and the bureau opened its first investigation into...
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Somewhere I remember reading something about one of the Ohrs having set up a shortwave radio for some strange reason.
ReplyDeleteAnybody know anything about that?