Senior leaders at the Justice Department did not want Bruce Ohr interacting with the White House after his contacts with Trump opposition research dossier author Christopher Steele became known, according to newly released testimony from Ohr’s closed-door congressional interview last year.
Ohr was demoted in December 2017 from his position as an associate deputy attorney general in part because he did not tell the department soon enough about his contacts with Steele, an ex-British intelligence official. But Ohr told Congress he was later stripped of another title the next month, running a Justice Department organized crime task force, for a different reason that came from then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein: the White House.
“I was told at the time that the attorney general and the deputy attorney general didn’t want me in a position where I would be interacting directly with the White House,” Ohr told the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees.
Ohr, who sparked the ire of President Donald Trump for his role as a middle man between the FBI and Steele, was one of numerous Justice Department and FBI officials the committees interviewed last year as part of the Republican-led investigation into the FBI and DOJ handling of the investigations into Hillary Clinton and Trump and Russia.
Ohr’s August 2018 testimony was released Friday by Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, who made the transcript public without consulting with the panel’s Democratic chairman and ignoring proposed redactions by the Justice Department.
Much of Ohr’s testimony has already been reported and his role in the Russia investigation is well known: Ohr met with Steele and Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, and passed along information he was provided to the FBI, which was investigating Trump campaign contacts with Russians. Ohr’s wife also worked for Fusion GPS as a contractor researching Russia.
Last year, Trump repeatedly attacked Ohr on Twitter and questioned why he was still employed by the Justice Department.
“Is it really possible that Bruce Ohr, whose wife Nellie was paid by Simpson and GPS Fusion for work done on the Fake Dossier, and who was used as a Pawn in this whole SCAM (WITCH HUNT), is still working for the Department of Justice?????” Trump tweeted in October.
The 236-page transcript filled in more details into Ohr’s testimony and role in the FBI’s Russia probe.
Among the previously reported details in Ohr’s testimony was his disclosure of meeting Steele at a breakfast with his wife in July 2016, around the same time that the FBI was opening its counterintelligence investigation.
At the breakfast, as CNN previously reported and the transcript confirmed, Ohr said that he was told by Steele that the former head of the Russian foreign intelligence service thought they had Trump “over a barrel.”
Ohr provided the FBI with a memory stick of information from Steele and Simpson, as well as one from his wife, but he did not look at either.
“I don’t plug any (memory) stick that anyone gives me, even my wife, into a work computer,” he said.
Transcript from GOP-led probe
In December, the Republicans leading the probe into the FBI and the Justice Department said in December they planned to make all of their interview transcripts public, after giving the agencies a chance to review them for classified or other information they did not want public.
But Republicans have grown frustrated with the pace of those reviews. Collins said Friday that the proposed DOJ redactions “have nothing to do with national security and are anathema to our goal of government transparency,” and therefore he was releasing the transcript in full.
The Georgia Republican told reporters that he would eventually release the committee’s other interview transcripts, such as those with former FBI agent Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page — who both worked on the Trump and Clinton investigations and exchanged anti-Trump text messages — but he did not have a timeline for those releases.
“People anticipate the Mueller report soon. Will he find any so-called collusion? Or was the only collusion among agency personnel who hated the president and started this investigation?” Collins said Friday.
Democrats said that Republicans were trying to use the transcripts from the previous Congress as way to distract from the new Democratic investigation into the President.
“All of this is a completely irrelevant distraction from the massive corruption that is surfacing in the Trump administration and the White House,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who sat in for most of the closed-door interviews last year. “And so they’re basically posting graffiti with all of these sideshow escapades.”
Ohr explains Steele interactions
In the testimony, Republicans pressed Ohr to explain why Steele and Simpson, who were being paid by the law firm representing the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, used him to provide their information to the FBI, rather than go directly.
Ohr told the committees that he had known Steele for nearly a decade, and he had passed along information previously, too. He said he didn’t know for sure why they came to him, but that he felt he had an obligation to give it to the FBI.
“Part of my job, as I saw it, as having been for a long time responsible for organized crime at the Department, was to try to gather as much information or introduce the FBI to possible sources of information, whatever ways to further the program’s goal,” Ohr said.
Republicans have accused the FBI of masking the political origins of the opposition research dossier when it was used to obtain a foreign surveillance warrant on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Ohr testified that he did inform the FBI that Steele was being paid from a political source. “I didn’t know they were employed by the DNC, but I certainly said, yes, that — that they were working for — you know, they were somehow working associated with the Clinton campaign,” Ohr said.
Republicans have also pointed to Ohr’s testimony to say that Steele was politically biased. Ohr told the committees that he “definitely got the impression (Steele) did not want Donald Trump to win the election,” though he could not remember if he said it directly.
But Ohr disputed that he was a “backchannel” to Steele for the FBI, which had stopped talking to him in October 2016 over his contacts with the media. Ohr said the bureau gave him a main “point of contact,” an agent named Joe Pientka, in case he had anything to report.
“I don’t know what the FBI’s thinking was specifically,” he said. “They just told me that if I received information, that there would be an agent that I could talk with.”
