Justice Department official Bruce Ohr testified to Congress last year that the FBI sought to contact Trump dossier author Christopher Steele long after he was terminated as a source.
Months after he spoke to members of the joint task force of the Judiciary and Oversight committees in a closed-door session, chunks of Ohr’s testimony were reported Monday by Jeff Carlson of the Epoch Times. Ohr created an unofficial back channel between the FBI and Steele, an ex-British spy who was hired by Fusion GPS and provided agents with opposition research on President Trump.
In the excerpts, Ohr is shown telling lawmakers that that there was “one occasion” in which the FBI encouraged him to reach out and obtain information from Steele in May 2017.
That was six months after Steele was dropped as an FBI source for providing confidential information to the media. The testimony shows Ohr being pressed on a text message exchange with Steele suggesting the idea of re-engaging with the FBI days after Director James Comey was fired by Trump.
Although Steele accepted the offer, the correspondence appeared to hit a roadblock upon the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, who took over the federal Russia investigation under the supervision of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
“We are frustrated with how long this re-engagement with the Bureau and Mueller is taking. There are some new perishable operational opportunities we do not want to miss out on,” Steele wrote Ohr in June 2017.
In another message in November, Steele said, “I am presuming you’ve heard nothing back from your SC colleagues on the issue you kindly put to them for me. We have heard nothing from them either. To say this is disappointing would be an understatement.”
While the exact timing is unclear, Ohr did tell investigators, “at some point during 2017, Chris Steele did speak with somebody from the FBI, but I don’t know who.” The content of such a discussion is unknown.
The FBI declined to comment, and a spokesperson for the Justice Department did not immediately return the Washington Examiner‘s request for comment.
Ohr, formerly the associate deputy attorney general and director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, was demoted after it came to light he met with Steele and Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson. His wife, Nellie Ohr, had done Russia research work for Fusion GPS and also passed along a thumb drive to her husband to give to the FBI.
Before losing control of the lower chamber at the start of the new term, GOP lawmakers sought to learn more about the government’s reliance on the Trump dossier, which contains a number of salacious claims about the president’s ties to Russia. That dossier, which contains several unverified claims about Trump’s ties to Russia, was used by the FBI in its FISA warrant applications to secure the authority to spy on onetime Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
As part of their investigative efforts looking for possible spy authority abuse, GOP lawmakers demanded the release of a dozen FD-302 reports, which contained summaries of FBI agents’ interactions with Ohr. Trump late last year ordered the immediate declassification of the 302s and other Russia-related documents, but later backed off after he said the DOJ and American allies made a convincing case to stop him.
He said that the DOJ inspector general had instead been asked to review these documents “on an expedited basis” and that he might ultimately choose to declassify the documents “if it proves necessary.”
