The mind-boggling scandal of the Obama administration’s treatment of the Trump presidential campaign continues to unravel, but you’d never know from taking in your news via the mainstream media. Former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr is scheduled to testify under oath this week before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees on August 28. Ohr seems to have served as a conduit for Christopher Steele’s continued service to the FBI after the FBI had supposedly terminated its relationship with Steele and while Ohr’s wife worked for Steele’s Clinton campaign contractor GPS Fusion/Glenn Simpson. What a tangled web. Can Ohr testify truthfully testify without grave legal risk to himself and his confederates?
The congressional committees have obtained a raft of communications passing among Ohr, Steele et al. The Hill’s John Solomon broke the story in the August 7 column “How a senior DOJ official helped Dem researchers on Trump-Russia case.” Solomon reported that “a close review of these new documents shows just how closely Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, who reported to Obama-era Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, maintained contact with Fusion — and, in particular, its primary source, former British spy Christopher Steele — before, during and after the election.” Solomon adds that “the new memos make clear that Ohr, a man whose name was barely uttered during the first 18 months of the scandal, may have played a critical role in stitching together a Democratic opposition research project and the top echelons of the FBI and DOJ.”
The Examiner’s Byron York followed up in the August 8 column “Emails show 2016 links among Steele, Ohr, Simpson — with Russian oligarch in background.”
Drawing on the work of Solomon and York, Margot Cleveland stepped back to consider “How Bruce Ohr Could Implicate High-Ranking Obama Officials In Spygate.”
This past week Sara Carter featured what might be the guiltiest sounding message from Steele. Her column puts part of the message in the headline: “New Texts Reveal Steele Anxious Over Comey Testimony, Hopes ‘Firewalls Will Hold.'” Wow.
Carter reports: “In March, 2017, two days before former FBI Director James Comey testified to lawmakers that the bureau had an open counterintelligence investigation into President Trump’s campaign, former British spy Christopher Steele sent an urgent message to Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr hoping that ‘important firewalls will hold’ when Comey testified.” Carter quotes the message: “We’re a bit apprehensive given scheduled appearance at Congress on Monday. Hoping that important firewalls will hold.” Have they mentioned this over at CNN or MSNBC?
In her weekly Wall Street Journal column Kim Strassel asks a good question: “What was Bruce Ohr doing?” My question is whether we will ever find out or whether those firewalls will hold (and, oh, yeah, what Ohr is doing at the Department of Justice).
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