Thursday, June 13, 2019

It Started With a Lie: Bruce Ohr's Linchpin Role in Russiagate

True. But the now-former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr is only part of that lie without his wife, Mrs. Nellie Ohr. Nellie is fluent in Russian; has a Ph.D in Russian history; studied in the Soviet Union in 1989; has a 2010 CIA 'affiliation; likes long walks on the beach; and was conveniently hired in May, 2016 by the DNC funded, Oppo-research firm Fusion GPS to conduct research and analysis of Donald Trump.

Oh, and she also provided the salacious and unverified Steele dossier to her husband, Bruce, who then passed it along to the now-former deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, and also to McCabe's advisor and FBI legal counsel, Lisa Page (who was embroiled in an adulterous relationship with Peter Stroz, the FBI’s now-former No. 2 counterintelligence official, who oversaw the FBI’s investigation into possible Trump campaign collusion with the Russian government).

What did Bruce Ohr not do? He didn't reveal on the required annual Public Financial Disclosure Report that his wife worked for the DNC funded, Oppo-research firm Fusion GPS.

From Eric Felten at RealClearInvestigations: "Why, if Ohr was willing to tell the FBI about his conflict of interest, had he done his best to hide it on his annual ethics filing? Why didn't he correct his filing to make it consistent with what he was telling the bureau? Perhaps because he counted on the FBI to keep his role in the affair secret. Ohr encouraged the FBI to listen to Steele’s stories. When Steele broke the bureau’s rules and lost his privileged (and paid) status, Ohr stepped in to keep the stories flowing. He would talk to Christopher Steele and then report the conversation to an FBI handler who would write up the discussion in a classified form 302.

In so doing, Ohr could expect that by dealing with the FBI, his significant part in helping his wife’s employer (Fusion GPS) achieve its goals would stay under wraps. By contrast, the annual ethics filings for senior government officials are public documents, available to anyone who asks for them. For Ohr to have listed his wife’s income from Fusion GPS would have been to risk exposing his own ties to Fusion GPS.

By December 2017, Bruce Ohr’s contacts with Christopher Steele had become known. Ohr, whose lawyer did not respond to a request for comment, was demoted from his senior position for failing to have been forthcoming with the Justice Department about his role as a courier carrying Steele’s opposition research to the FBI."

Between Bruce and Steele, Nellie Ohr is the woman in the middle. From  Diana West at The American Spectator: "Under Senate and House questioning, Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson consistently failed to disclose Nellie Ohr’s existence as one of his firm’s paid Russian experts, let alone that he hired her for the red-hot DNC/Clinton campaign Trump-Russia project.

Even Christopher Steele may have tried to keep Nellie Ohr “under cover.” Steele, put forth as the “dossier” author ever since its January 2017 publication in BuzzFeed, does not appear to have let on to his many media and political contacts that he had “dossier”-assistance from at least two fellow Fusion GPS Russian experts, Nellie Ohr and Edward Baumgartner. Baumgartner, interestingly, was a Russian history major at Vassar in the 1990s when Nellie Ohr taught Russian history there.

Thus, Nellie Ohr’s exact activities inside one of the great Russian-American disinformation campaigns of all time remain opaque. What most observers don’t realize, though, is that we already have a window onto her thinking through her strongly-etched, ideological view of Soviet history."

Author West then goes on to paint a lengthy portrait from Nellie Ohr's own academic paper trail which reveals a woman very much enamored of all things USSR, and one who "follows in the academic tradition of 1970s and 1980s “revisionism.” IE: champion the lofty promise of socialist revolution, and whitewash the mass murder, starvation, and gulags inherent inside the extinct USSR.

Meanwhile, here and now in the USA, the Barr Spygate Train rumbles ever forward: Justice Dept. Seeks to Question C.I.A. in Its Own Russia Investigation.
"The interview plans are the latest sign the Justice Department will take a critical look at the C.I.A.’s work on Russia’s election interference. Investigators want to talk with at least one senior counterintelligence official and a senior C.I.A. analyst, the people said. Both officials were involved in the agency’s work on understanding the Russian campaign to sabotage the election in 2016.

While the Justice Department review is not a criminal inquiry, it has provoked anxiety in the ranks of the C.I.A., according to former officials. Senior agency officials have questioned why the C.I.A.’s analytical work should be subjected to a federal prosecutor’s scrutiny. Attorney General William P. Barr, who is overseeing the review, assigned the United States attorney in Connecticut, John H. Durham, to conduct it."

I wonder how many 'process crimes' with possible jail sentences have anything to do with "provoked anxiety in the ranks of the C.I.A?" After all, no one is above the law, and if you ain't guilty, what do you have to hide? Hmm??