Justice Department official Bruce Ohr testified last year about how he unilaterally decided not to inform his direct superior, Sally Yates, of his unofficial back channel between the FBI and the author of the so-called Trump dossier even though that broke from his normal routine.
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, who was at one time the No. 4 official at the Justice Department, faced a grilling from the GOP side about why he left Yates in the dark.
Ohr said it was a “regular practice” for him to make direct contact with the FBI with information about organized crime over the years and while he wasn’t serving as an investigator or prosecutor for an FBI case he felt that providing the bureau “source lead information” from Christopher Steele, a British ex-spy who was hired by Fusion GPS, was “overall part of my job.”
But the questions he faced may shed light on other motives.
Asked by Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., if it was his typical routine to let his supervisor know about his professional activity, Ohr said, “In general, yes.” But when it came to his informal conduit between the FBI and Steele, Ohr said he didn’t see the point in letting his boss know.
Asserting how he didn’t think his superiors in the Deputy Attorney General’s Office would be able to act on the information, Meadows jumped in.
“You could act on it, but they couldn’t?” the congressman said.
Ohr replied: “I could pass it to the FBI. All they could do is pass it to the FBI.”
Yates would be brought up repeatedly by investigators throughout the roughly eight-hour-long interview, and Ohr stressed on multiple occasions how he didn’t want to make it part of a larger policy discussion that a political appointee would bring to the matter.
Yates was appointed to the role of U.S. attorney and later deputy attorney general by President Barack Obama. She served as acting attorney general for 10 days under the Trump administration in January 2017 when President Trump fired her after she refused to defend his initial travel ban.
Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, pinned Ohr on another matter.
Ohr testified to investigators that in addition to being Steele’s liaison to the FBI, he also passed along to the bureau a thumb drive given to him by his wife Nellie Ohr, who was employed by Fusion GPS to conduct research on Russia. Steele too had been conducting research for Fusion GPS, the firm that was hired to conduct opposition research by a lawyer who represented the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Through his line of questioning, Ratcliffe said he was “trying to understand [Ohr’s] mindset for the Sally Yates issue and what she knew and when she knew it.” He then walked Ohr through the rules against DOJ officials being involved in cases where they get a financial benefit.
Ohr again stressed that he wasn’t part of any case; he was only passing along information to the FBI and they could decide what to do with it. But he admitted that through his wife he would ultimately benefit financially from her work.
Ratcliffe then got to the crux of the issue: “OK. Did you ever file financial disclosures reflecting that you received financial benefits as it pertained to your wife Nellie Ohr on a matter before the Department of Justice?”
Ohr replied: “Not that I received. I filed the public financial disclosure reports regularly. I did not report that I was receiving money in connection with a matter I was working on because, in my mind, I’m not.”
Asked if others thought that was an incorrect assumption on his part, Brad Weinsheimer, an associate deputy attorney general, advised Ohr that he could not answer the question. Ohr also said he was unaware of any internal investigation into the financial disclosures related to Nellie Ohr’s work and how much she made for the case, although Ratcliffe suggested the figure was $44,000.
Nellie Ohr herself was brought in by the House task force for questioning in October, but she exercised spousal privilege. Another source of frustration was Glenn Simpson, the co-founder of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that hired Nellie Ohr and Steele to do research. He pleaded the Fifth Amendment to House Republicans who were seeking his testimony on the role his company played in creating an investigation into Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
While the GOP investigators hounded Bruce Ohr for not notifying Yates, the Democratic side drove home the point that Ohr didn’t violate any DOJ policy.
And yet Ohr testified that his conversations with Steele, including after Steele was dropped as an FBI source for providing confidential information to the media, made up one of two reasons for getting demoted between December 2017 and January 2018. He formerly served as the associate deputy attorney general and director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. His new role as of January was senior counsel in the Office of International Affairs in the Criminal Division.
“One was they said I had not given them sufficiently and timely notice of my conversations with Chris Steele,” Ohr said. He later noted that he wasn’t sure specifically what would have been early enough and it was never explained to him. Secondly, Ohr said the DOJ was already planning a reorganization where none of the component heads would be sitting within the Deputy Attorney General’s Office and that he eventually would have been moved anyway.
Although Ohr said to lawmakers he never told Yates of his dealings with Steele and the FBI, he admitted it was “possible” she had another source inform her about it. Requests for comment to both Yates and the DOJ were not returned for this report.
One notable point of concern for Republicans was how Yates signed off on at least one of the FISA warrant applications to spy on onetime Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. The issue of alleged government abuse has been a central concern of GOP inquiries into potential bias in the upper reaches of the DOJ and FBI. A House Intelligence Committee memo released in February 2018 found that information from Steele’s dossier, which contained unverified claims about Trump’s ties to Russia, were used by the FBI in the four applications to gain the authority to wiretap Page. The memo also said the FBI left out certain information including its author’s anti-Trump bias and Democratic benefactors.
Although GOP members expressed interest in interviewing Yates again at the time of Ohr’s testimony, an aide on the GOP side of the Judiciary Committee told the Washington Examiner it was her understanding that Yates was never brought in before Democrats took control of the House and the task force ending their inquiry. The aide did not say whether the GOP minority would attempt to get testimony from Yates this term.
Among the contacts Ohr had in the FBI were Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the ex-officials infamous for their text message exchanges rife with anti-Trump sentiment, and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
