Justice Department official Bruce Ohr completely bypassed his superiors at the agency when he connected with FBI officials to share information he received from British ex-spy Christopher Steele, the author of the Trump dossier, according to a report Thursday.
While President Trump and Republican lawmakers have been eager to use Ohr’s link to the unverified dossier to discredit special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, sources who spoke to ABC News emphasized that Ohr was a rogue actor whose efforts held little sway.
“Nobody knew. He didn’t tell anybody,” said one former DOJ official who worked with Ohr, who had been associate deputy attorney general. “It was completely outside the scope of what he was asked to do. It wasn’t even close to his job.”
Ohr is scheduled to give testimony to the Oversight and Judiciary Committees behind closed doors on Tuesday. In previewing what GOP investigators are poised to ask, Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, told Fox News on Sunday that he and his colleagues would ask Ohr about whether there was a bias campaign against Trump that led even further up the power chain in the Obama administration, particularly by ex-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.
“The real question that we need to find out from Mr. Ohr: Was he just a rogue employee acting improperly on his own or did he have some authority from within the Department of Justice and was Sally Yates aware of what he was doing?” Ratcliffe said.
However, sources told ABC News that Yates and Ohr’s other superiors were kept in the dark about his actions.
Steele repeatedly was in contact with Ohr via email, phone, and in person in the summer and fall of 2016, and Ohr met with FBI officials to relay what he had learned. Ohr also passed along opposition research from his wife, Nellie Ohr, who worked for Fusion GPS, the firm that commission Steele’s work and a copy of Steele’s dossier, which contained salacious claims about Trump’s ties to Russia. However, the FBI had already obtained a copy. One of the FBI officials who met Ohr was Peter Strzok, the former agent acknowledged in congressional testimony last month. Strzok once played a leading role in Mueller’s inquiry and was recently fired from the bureau over anti-Trump text messages he sent a colleague with whom he was having an affair.
A source familiar with the Russia investigation that Ohr was “a non-figure, a non-entity in all of this.”
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is overseeing Mueller’s efforts, has told lawmakers that his office “never involved” Ohr in the Russia investigation under the Trump administration and that Ohr was assigned “no role” in it.
Ohr was demoted after it came to light he met with Steele and Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson. Ohr still has a role in the DOJ working in the Organized Crime Task Force and amid a review by the Trump administration, the president said last week that he would “very quickly” revoke Ohr’s security clearance.
