Simpson Tried to Deceive Congress On the Fusion GPS/Obama DOJ Connection

Few people had heard of Bruce Ohr until recently, but he was an important bureaucrat in the Department of Justice–until a month or so ago, he was both associate deputy attorney general and director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. He was demoted in December 2016, apparently because he “withheld his contacts with the Fusion GPS men [Glenn Simpson and Christopher Steele] from colleagues at the DOJ.”

So Glenn Simpson’s testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, as it relates to Ohr, is of great interest. Simpson testified in November 2016, a month before it came out that his wife, Nellie, worked for Fusion’s Simpson; not only that, she worked on the Donald Trump “investigation.” The conflict of interest here is almost unbelievable; but remember, in November 2016, no one knew about it.

This is what Glenn Simpson had to say about his dealings with Bruce Ohr, when Ohr was a senior member of the Department of Justice:

Q You’ve never heard from anyone in the U.S. Government in relation to those matters i.e., the fake Trump dossier], either the FBI or the Department of Justice?

A After the election. I mean, during the election, no.

Q What did you hear after and from whom and when?

A I was asked to provide some information to the Justice Department.

Q By whom and when?

A It was by a prosecutor named Bruce Ohr, who was following up. You know, l can’t remember when. It was sometime after Thanksgiving, I think.

Q Thanksgiving of 2016?

A Yes.

Consider the monumental dishonesty of Simpson’s answer. He “was asked to provide some information to the Justice Department” by “a prosecutor named Bruce Ohr.” Simpson neglects to mention that Ohr’s wife, one of only a handful of employees of Fusion GPS, had been paid to work on the Trump “investigation” at Simpson’s direction. According to Simpson, Ohr was just a “prosecutor” who was “following up.”

Q Did Mr. Ohr reach out to you, or how did that shake out?

A I think Chris–it was someone that Chris Steele knows. I think —

Q I’m sorry. Chris Steele knows who?

A Bruce Ohr.

This testimony is absurd. Simpson has testified that Fusion GPS has approximately 10 employees, one of whom was Nellie Ohr. His testimony that Bruce Ohr was “someone that Chris Steele knows” was at best deliberately deceptive, at worst outright perjury.

Simpson’s testimony, and his deception, continue:

The context of this is that it was after the election. A very surprising thing had happened, which is that Donald Trump had won. There was — we were — by that time, we were enormously concerned about rapidly accumulating indications that the Russian Government had mounted a massive attack on the American election system and that, you know, Donald Trump or his associates might have been involved.

And there was a lot of alarming things happening, including Donald Trump saying things about Vladimir Putin that didn’t really make any sense, weren’t ordinary things for a Republican to say, and, you know– anyway. .
So we had also by this time given this information to the FBI, and they had, you know, told – indicated to Chris that they were investigating it, and then told – apparently told The New York Times they weren’t.

That situation was unacceptable to a firm whose client, as Simpson has acknowledged, was the Democratic National Committee. Fusion GPS’s effort–one should rather say, the DNC’s effort–to undermine the Trump administration continued after the election:

And so it was not clear to us whether anyone at a high level of government was aware of the information that Chris had gathered and provided to the FBI. And, you know, so we were, frankly, you know, very scared for the country and for ourselves and felt that if we could give it to someone else, we should, higher up.

Yes, plus they were being paid by the DNC. Simpson’s protestations that he is merely a Boy Scout/good citizen are laughable.

And so Chris suggested I give some information to Bruce, give him the background to all this. And we eventually met at a coffee shop, and I told him the story.

Again, Simpson treads the fine line between deception and perjury. He obviously didn’t need the Brit Christopher Steele, his subcontractor on the DNC’s dirty tricks job, to introduce him to Bruce Ohr. Nellie Ohr was his employee, who worked on the anti-Trump project on behalf of the DNC. No doubt Bruce and Nellie are loyal Democrats, like Glenn Simpson.

It would take an idiot (or maybe a journalist) not to understand what happened here. The DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign wanted to continue their anti-Trump campaign, notwithstanding that Trump had been elected president. To their surprise, evidently, although I, for one, predicted it. Someone continued to pay Fusion GPS to try to undermine the nascent Trump administration with the lies that were assembled in Steele’s laughable “dossier.” Simpson had an easy connection to the FBI through his employee Nellie Ohr. It was no problem for him to slide the fake dossier to Ohr, and perhaps others at the Obama DOJ, who were relied on to take it from there.

What happened after that, we don’t know for sure. We do know that Barack Obama corrupted the Department of Justice to an unprecedented degree. It is being widely reported, as Paul has noted, that Congress is in possession of a document that “might lead to the removal of senior officials in the FBI and Department of Justice, and perhaps even to the criminal prosecution of some. ” I suspect that Bruce Ohr is high on the list of potential criminal defendants.

At this point, one could say that the Fusion GPS Democratic Party smear is a bad joke, except that it isn’t funny. Government corruption never is.

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