Justice Department official Bruce Ohr told congressional investigators last year his unofficial back channel between the FBI and Christopher Steele lasted up to November 2017, stretching far beyond the last known FBI report about his interactions with the author of the so-called Trump dossier.
During a private interview in August with a joint task force of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees looking into alleged bias by the FBI and DOJ, the transcript of which was released Friday, Ohr was asked about a letter from then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, to leaders at the agencies asking for the declassification of a dozen known FD-302 reports which contained summaries of FBI agents’ interviews with Ohr dating from November 2016 to May 2017.
Ohr said the time frame of the 302s was consistent with his recollection, but noted there were further communications with Steele and subsequent reports to the FBI.
“The caveat I would say is, I continued to have some conversations with Christopher Steele after May 15, 2017. I’ve reported all of those to the FBI, but I do not see any 302s relating to those conversations,” he said.
Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, later asked if there was something different about those later interviews which may have led the FBI to leave out any 302 reports about them in response to a request by Congress.
“I don’t know if they did 302s later on,” Ohr answered. “A lot of these conversations seemed less substantive, but I don’t know. I didn’t know about the original 302s either.”
The timing of the FBI seemingly casting aside the 302s was notable, as it came just after the FBI sought to re-engage Steele months after he was dropped as a source for providing confidential information to the media.
FBI special agent Joe Pientka met with Ohr and brought up reconnecting with Steele on May 12, according to FBI documents cited by a RealClearInvestigations report last week, coinciding with a meeting listed in Grassley’s letter.
That was two days after former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe says he opened a counterintelligence investigation into President Trump after he fired FBI Director James Comey.
The final known 302 report showed that Pientka met with Ohr on May 15, the same day Steele texted Ohr to say he agreed to meet with the FBI.
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 to the Washington Examiner when asked about it in January when part of the Ohr testimony transcript was leaked to the media.
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 unverified claims about the president’s ties to Russia and was used by the FBI in its Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant applications to secure the authority to spy on onetime Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
As part of their investigative efforts looking for possible surveillance abuse, GOP lawmakers demanded the release of the dozen known 302 reports related to Ohr. Late last year Trump 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.”
That declassification has yet to happen.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., reignited the investigation into alleged FISA abuse on Thursday, demanding from the Justice Department a wide array of documentation related to the surveillance of Page and other members of the 2016 Trump campaign. Among his list of demands was the disclosure of all the FD-302 reports for Ohr and any other official who received information from outside the government that was used in the Page warrant applications.
