A conservative watchdog group is suing the Justice Department for information on interviews the FBI conducted with controversial DOJ official Bruce Ohr.
Judicial Watch announced Wednesday it filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against DOJ in the hope of obtaining more details on how Christopher Steele, the British ex-spy who wrote the infamous Trump dossier, funneled any intelligence he gathered to the FBI.
Ohr, who until December was U.S. associate deputy attorney general, has been criticized by congressional Republicans after they learned he circumvented his DOJ superiors and contacted the FBI with information he received from Steele and his wife Nellie Ohr, who was a contractor for Fusion GPS.
Fusion GPS is the opposition research firm that commissioned Steele’s dossier, which was also partly funded by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Ohr, however, failed to disclose the connection in federal forms before the election.
Ohr told members of a joint task force of the Judiciary and Oversight committees in August that one of the people he spoke to at the FBI about the Steele dossier was fired Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. McCabe signed off on one of the FISA warrant applications submitted to surveil former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page. The applications are controversial given they were based in part on the dossier.
Judicial Watch has also taken legal action against the DOJ in a bid to get the department to turn over all records of contact or communication between Ohr and Steele, as well as between Ohr and Fusion GPS owner Glenn Simpson.
Ohr’s interactions with Steele have attracted attention because they continued after the FBI cut him off as a confidential source due to the unauthorized disclosure of information he made to the media.
Judicial Watch will appear in a federal district court in Washington on Thursday for a hearing related to the latter case. The DOJ has said it has located 1,650 relevant documents but has requested to wait until February 2019 after the midterm elections to hand them over.
