WhatFinger


Bruce Ohr was supposed to testify before the House Intelligence Committee today, but suddenly a "scheduling conflict" has changed that.

DOJ demotes official who concealed his meetings with Fusion GPS, where oh by the way his wife worked



 Bruce Ohr How much worse is this going to get? And not for President Trump. With each passing day it seems the FBI, the Justice Department and the Mueller investigative team has more to answer for, and fewer answers to offer for their inappropriate actions, bias and stonewalling. Remember, the big question is this: Did the FBI (which is part of the Justice Department) use the fake Trump dossier compiled by Fusion GPS, and paid for by the Clinton campaign, to convince the FISA court to approve wiretaps on Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Carter Page? If so, then you had a Democrat administration spying on a Republican campaign team, having used the legal system under false pretenses to gain permission to do so. It's exactly what Richard Nixon tried to do to the McGovern campaign in 1972, but accomplished with a FISA application full of falsehoods instead of with a break-in.

FBI director Christopher Wray refuses to answer

During the past week's hearings, members of the House Intelligence Committee have pointedly asked FBI director Christopher Wray who prepared the FISA application, and if the Clinton-funded, Fusion GPS fake dossier was used to justify the request. Wray refuses to answer, falsely claiming he can't, even after committee chairman Bob Goodlatte reminds him that the committee members have top-level security clearances and that the House Intelligence Committee has oversight authority over the FISA court. In other words, there is no reason Wray can't answer the question. But he continues to stonewall. Why? Maybe this is why:
A senior Justice Department official demoted last week for concealing his meetings with the men behind the anti-Trump “dossier” had even closer ties to Fusion GPS, the firm responsible for the incendiary document, than have been disclosed, Fox News has confirmed: The official’s wife worked for Fusion GPS during the 2016 election. Contacted by Fox News, investigators for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) confirmed that Nellie H. Ohr, wife of the demoted official, Bruce G. Ohr, worked for the opposition research firm last year. The precise nature of Mrs. Ohr’s duties – including whether she worked on the dossier – remains unclear but a review of her published works available online reveals Mrs. Ohr has written extensively on Russia-related subjects. HPSCI staff confirmed to Fox News that she was paid by Fusion GPS through the summer and fall of 2016. Fusion GPS has attracted scrutiny because Republican lawmakers have spent the better part of this year investigating whether the dossier, which was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, served as the basis for the Justice Department and the FBI to obtain FISA surveillance last year on a Trump campaign adviser named Carter Page. “The House Intelligence Committee,” Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., told Fox News in a statement on Monday, “is looking into all facets of the connections between the Department of Justice and Fusion GPS, including Mr. Ohr.”

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Until Dec. 6, when Fox News began making inquiries about him, Bruce Ohr held two titles at DOJ. He was, and remains, director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force; but his other job was far more senior. Mr. Ohr held the rank of associate deputy attorney general, a post that gave him an office four doors down from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The day before Fox News reported that Mr. Ohr held his secret meetings last year with the founder of Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, and with Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled the dossier, the Justice Department stripped Ohr of his deputy title and ousted him from his fourth floor office at the building that DOJ insiders call “Main Justice.” The Department of Justice has provided no public explanation for Ohr’s demotion. Officials inside the Department have told Fox News his wearing of two hats was “unusual,” but also confirm Ohr had withheld his contacts with the Fusion GPS men from colleagues at the DOJ.

Bruce Ohr held two titles at DOJ.

So how much does this stink? You've got a top Justice official who is meeting with Fusion GPS but hiding that fact from his colleagues at Justice, and it also turns out that his wife works for Fusion GPS in some capacity. And this comes out the day before Ohr is supposed to testify before the House Intelligence Committee, and now suddenly he has a "scheduling conflict" and is not going to testify. Perfect. This comes a week after we learned that FBI agent Peter Strzok was thrown off Mueller's investigative team because he was caught exchanging anti-Trump texts with a mistress. We also learned that it was Strzok who edited James Comey's statement exonerating Hillary, changing "gross negligence" to "extreme carelessness" because the former wording would have demonstrated without a doubt that she was guilty and was being allowed to skate - not that there was any doubt about that even with Strzok's edit.

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"Trump/Russia collusion" business was concocted out of whole cloth by people trying to create a narrative to damage the Trump campaign

Wray also refused to answer when asked if Strzok was involved with preparing the FISA application. Here's how all this looks to me: The FBI, at the direction of Barack Obama and Loretta Lynch, was deployed to a) help Hillary escape charges related to her schlock, homebrew e-mail server; and b) come up with a false pretense for FISA approval to wiretap Trump campaign officials. You think Russia tried to manipulate the 2016 election? It looks more like the FBI tried to manipulate the 2016 election, on orders from Barack Obama, and now the holdovers at the FBI and the DOJ are doing everything they can to prevent this from being discovered. Yet I don't see how they can stonewall this forever. The House Intelligence Committee does have oversight authority over all this, and if Wray and others continue to refuse to answer questions or provide documents, they can be ordered to do so by their superiors at the DOJ, or by President Trump himself, who is after all the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. Eventually we're going to know what was in that FISA application, and who prepared and submitted it. And if it turns out they used the fake dossier prepared by Fusion GPS, while Bruce Ohr was secretly meeting with Fusion GPS and his wife was working there, then we've got a presidential scandal of massive proportions. But the scandal will belong to President Obama, not President Trump. It also looks increasingly to me like this entire "Trump/Russia collusion" business was concocted out of whole cloth by people trying to create a narrative to damage the Trump campaign. Even now the only charges the Mueller team has produced have been process crimes that in no way point to the type of collusion they were looking for when the investigation started. We have seen nothing to suggest there was any collusion between Trump and Russia, but we're seeing more every day to suggest there was collusion between the FBI and surrogates for the Clinton campaign. That will likely turn out to be the real story here, even though many Americans have bought into the narrative they've been sold, and will never be convinced it was all baloney.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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