The DOJ has demoted Bruce G. Ohr amid a probe into his contacts with the Fusion GPS firm, the company that produced the infamous dossier on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. From Fox News:
Initially senior department officials could not provide the reason for Ohr’s demotion, but Fox News has learned that evidence collected by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., indicates that Ohr met during the 2016 campaign with Christopher Steele, the former British spy who authored the “dossier.”Later, a Justice Department official told Fox News, “It is unusual for anyone to wear two hats as he has done recently. This person is going to go back to a single focus—director of our organized crime and drug enforcement unit. As you know, combatting transnational criminal organizations and drug trafficking is a top priority for the Attorney General.”Additionally, House investigators have determined that Ohr met shortly after the election with Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS – the opposition research firm that hired Steele to compile the dossier with funds supplied by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. By that point, according to published reports, the dossier had been in the hands of the FBI, which exists under the aegis of DOJ, for some five months, and the surveillance on Page had been commenced more than two months prior.
The demotion stripped him of his title as associate deputy attorney general. He retains his title of director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF). He will also vacate his office on the fourth floor of “Main Justice,” which was located four offices down from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
Fox News noted that those “contacts between Ohr and Steele, and between Ohr and Simpson, have not been publicly disclosed nor shared with HPSCI staff.”
Fox News continued:
According to congressional sources, Simpson and Ohr met sometime around Thanksgiving last year, when President-elect Trump was in the process of selecting his Cabinet, and discussed over coffee the anti-Trump dossier, the Russia investigation, and what Simpson considered the distressing development of Trump’s victory.How exactly Simpson and Ohr came to know each other is still being investigated but initial evidence collected by the House intelligence committee suggests that the two were placed in touch by Steele, a former FBI informant whose contacts with Ohr are said by senior DOJ officials to date back to 2006.
Former FBI Director James Comey told a House panel in March that the dossier was filled with “salacious and unverified” allegations against Trump and those who worked with him.
Nunes has sent out a subpoena today “specifically covering Ohr and his files.” He has also told staff of the HPSCI “to draft contempt-of-Congress citations against Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray.”
Nunes and his colleagues have sent many “subpoenas for documents and witnesses related to the dossier but claims DOJ and FBI have ‘stonewalled,’ an assertion that House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., seconded in a rare public statement in October.”
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