Fresh off the heels of revelations a senior member of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team praised Acting Attorney General Sally Yates for refusing to implement President Trump's first travel ban, Fox News reports a DOJ attorney was demoted after he met with the author of the now infamous Trump dossier.
Until Wednesday morning, Bruce G. Ohr held two titles at DOJ: associate deputy attorney general, a post that placed him four doors down from his boss, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein; and director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF), a program described by the department as “the centerpiece of the attorney general’s drug strategy.”
Ohr will retain his OCDETF title but has been stripped of his higher post and ousted from his office on the fourth floor of “Main Justice.”
Initially senior department officials could not provide the reason for Ohr’s demotion, but Fox News has learned that evidence collected by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., indicates that Ohr met during the 2016 campaign with Christopher Steele, the former British spy who authored the “dossier."
Some argue the dossier, paid for by the Clinton campaign, was used by the FBI to obtain FISA warrants on Trump transition team officials. A number of Obama administration officials, including former National Security Advisor Susan Rice and UN Ambassador Samantha Power, have been accused of unlawfully unmasking Trump officials for political reasons.
During testimony on Capitol Hill Thursday, FBI Director Christopher Wray refused to answer questions pertaining to how the FBI used the dossier and whether agents presented it to a judge in order to obtain warrants.
Earlier this week news surfaced FBI agent Peter Strzok was removed from the Special Counsel investigation after he sent anti-Trump, pro-Hillary Clinton text messages to an FBI attorney with whom he was having an affair. During Wray's testimony, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan said there seems to be more to the story and a potential connection between Strzok and the dossier.
Meanwhile, the House and Senate Intelligence Committee are continuing their investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
