We’re still finding nuggets from the Department of Justice Inspector General report on Obama-era FISA abuses that centered on the FBI altering a spy warrant application for former Trump campaign officials Carter Page during the 2016 election. Pretty much Inspector General Michael Horowitz said that someone should be fired, as the issue here was systemic from the supervisory level on down. Exculpatory evidence was omitted. This is a problem. Yet, Margot Cleveland at The Federalist found another thing that was overlooked.
This is all grounded in the Trump dossier. This whole Trump-Russia collusion myth was grounded in this document that was compiled by ex-MI6 spook Christopher Steele. He was hired by Fusion GPS, a research firm whose services were retained by the Hillary Clinton campaign. It was a biased piece of political opposition research that’s riddled with errors and possible Russian misinformation. Steele was hired to find dirt on Trump in Russia. And this is what the FBI said was credible evidence to secure a FISA spy warrant. It’s madness. But the DOJ IG report also noted that the FBI and a Russian oligarch might have conspired to take down Trump and it’s all because of the top officials at the DOJ bought into the dossier as gospel, as Cleveland noted. Well, it took this IG report and the report filed by ex-Special Counsel Robert Mueller at the end of his probe into Russian collusion that this dossier is pretty much total garbage. There was collusion and election tampering it would seem, but it was from the DOJ, not the Kremlin (via The Federalist):
Two-hundred-plus pages into the IG report, while discussing former Associate Deputy Attorney General Ohr’s continued contacts with Crossfire Hurricane dossier author Christopher Steele, Horowitz revealed a significant detail that to date has been overlooked: “On December 7, 2016, Ohr conveyed an interagency meeting (including representatives from the FBI) regarding strategy in dealing with Russian Oligarch 1.”
The IG report added that after the meeting “one of Ohr’s junior Department colleagues who attended the meeting” asked “Ohr about why the U.S. government would support trying to work with Russian Oligarch 1”—the moniker used in the IG report to refer to one of Vladimir Putin’s closest confidants, the aluminum oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
Ohr’s reported response is shocking: “Ohr told her that Steele provided information that the Trump campaign had been corrupted by the Russians,” and that the corruption went all the way to president-elect Trump. Ohr’s junior colleague told the IG that Ohr explained “this information was ‘the basis for the [Deripaska] discussion” in the interagency meeting they had just left.
It has been known for some time that Steele spoke with Ohr about Deripaska. But while the Steele-friendly press portrayed those discussions as FBI attempts to flip Deripaska, the IG reached a different conclusion. He found “Steele performed work for Russian Oligarch 1’s attorney on Russian Oligarch 1’s litigation matters, and, as described later in Chapter Nine, passed information to Department attorney Bruce Ohr advocating on behalf of one of Russian Oligarch 1’s companies regarding U.S. sanctions.” The IG further found that Ohr and Steele’s communications concerning Deripaska occurred “in 2016 during the time period before and after Steele was terminated as a [Confidential Human Source].”
These findings, coupled with previous reports that Steele worked for one of Deripaska’s lawyers, London-based Paul Hauser, and appeared to lobby on behalf of Deripaska through a D.C.-based attorney, Adam Waldman, renew questions concerning whether Steele violated the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). Likewise, the IG report’s notes that “Ohr said that he understood Steele was ‘angling’ for Ohr to assist him with his clients’ issues,” and that “Ohr stated that Steele was hoping that Ohr would intercede on his behalf with the Department attorney handling a matter involving a European company,” suggest the need for a FARA investigation into Steele’s work.
She goes into further detail about this portion of the report, which you can read on your own, but it once again shows that deep state antics isn’t crazy talk.
“The implications are startling: Ohr, in his apparent capacity as director of OCDETF, called a meeting of agency members to discuss ‘working with’ a Russian oligarch because of his belief, premised on the unverified Steele dossier, that President-elect Trump was corrupt,” wrote Cleveland.
And you all know about Bruce Ohrby now, right? His wife worked for Fusion at the time Steele was collecting his information. He met with Steelemultiple times and tried to hide it, eventually being demoted due to the lack of transparency. But he has yet to be fired from the DOJ.
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