‘Clinton campaign operative Nellie Ohr may as well as have had a desk at the Justice Department…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Judicial Watch released a trove of documents that shed further light on the conspiracy linking the Obama Justice Department with the anti-Trump smear operation, funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign, that produced the now-debunked Steele Dossier.
The transparency watchdog said it had obtained 330 pages of Justice Department records through its public records requests outlining the efforts of Bruce Ohr, then an associate deputy attorney general, whose wife, Nellie, was a researcher with the firm that created the dossier, Fusion GPS.
The documents revealed that attempts to link Trump with Russia began months before the November 2016 election and continued even after the election, when Ohr emailed himself files from his wife in December 2016 that suggested ties between Trump and his former campaign director, Paul Manafort, with the Russian organized crime underworld.
“These documents show a crazed DOJ–FBI effort to use the Clinton spy ring at Fusion GPS, namely Nellie Ohr, to smear President Trump—even before he was sworn in as president,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton in a statement.
“Clinton campaign operative Nellie Ohr may as well as have had a desk at the Justice Department.”
Although the thinly sourced claims in the Steele Dossier were swiftly debunked after it leaked to mainstream media outlets, partisan operatives within the FBI continued to coordinate their efforts to undermine and spy on the president-elect months into Trump’s presidency.
Those efforts culminated in the firing of FBI Director James Comey, which in turn helped to trigger the two-year-long Mueller investigation into Russian collusion.
A Republican-led House of Representatives, prior to the 2018 midterm election, held hearings during which both Ohrs were called to testify about their role in the Russia-gate hoax.
However, in May 2019, Rep. Mark Meadows, R-NC—a close confidante of the president and leader of the Freedom Caucus—sent a criminal referral to Attorney General William Barr saying Nellie Ohr lied in her testimony by indicating that she had “no role” in the DOJ investigation.
Judicial Watch said the latest document release supported Meadows’s conclusion, including a May 2016 exchange between Bruce Ohr and DOJ prosecutors who said she could be a “great resource” in their investigation.
“I’m sure Nellie would be delighted to speak with them,” Ohr replied. “I’m pretty sure there is no conflict of interest since they aren’t paying her or anything like that.”
Ohr later testified that he did not raise the matter of his role in the case with his supervisor, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, even as he was working directly with top-level FBI officials to convey the information provided by his wife.
Yates herself was later fired by Trump for insubordination in refusing to help enforce a travel ban on countries that harbored Islamic terrorists.
One of the shocking revelations of the Mueller Report was the degree to which the FBI and Justice Department in their investigations of Trump relied on media complicity.
The agency was revealed to have engaged in widespread leaking, and then to have used the reports in the media—which they themselves helped engineer—in order to bolster and justify their own agenda.
Such was the case in an email exchange from February 2017 revealed in the Judicial Watch release, in which a State Department official forwarded to Bruce Ohr a Huffington Post article that claimed one of the allegations in the Steele Dossier was grounds for impeachment.
Ohr then forwarded the article to the FBI’s Washington field office.
Currently, at least two investigations within the Justice Department—led by Inspector General Michael Horowitz and special prosecutor John Durham—are seeking to unravel the web of innuendo and deception surrounding the origins of the Russia hoax.