Guest post by Joe Hoft
As the details behind the Spygate scandal are uncovered, the connections to former President Obama are unearthed.
According to Zero Hedge, the head of opposition research firm Fusion GPS admitted in December 2017 in a court filing that his firm paid the wife of a senior Justice Department official to help dig up damaging information on then-candidate Donald Trump.
Glenn Simpson, co-founder of Fusion GPS, filed the signed declaration in a D.C. court this week affirming that Nellie Ohr, wife of demoted DOJ official Bruce Ohr, was contracted by Fusion through the summer and fall of 2016 “to help our company with its research and analysis of Mr. Trump,” according to the filing. The House Intelligence Committee determined that in November 2016, Simpson met with Bruce Ohr shortly after the election to discuss their findings regarding Russia and Trump. Bruce Ohr lost his senior-level position at the DOJ as associate deputy attorney general after his meetings with Simpson and British spy Christopher Steele, who assembled the Trump-Russia dossier, were discovered.
And why would Fusion GPS hire Nellie Ohr? Aside from the obvious connection to her DOJ husband who was in a position to provide Fusion GPS with information on Trump gathered by US intelligence agencies, Nellie Ohr also represented the CIA’s “Open Source Works” group in a 2010 “expert working group report on international organized crime” along with Bruce Ohr and Glenn Simpson.
The connections between Nellie Ohr and the ‘Spygate’ scandal were hidden at a distance for months.
As noted last week at TGP, Nellie Ohr is a Communist sympathizer connected to Russia as well as a corrupt Never-Trumper.
Author Diana West at the American Spectator recently posted an article on Nellie Ohr, who they call “the “dossier” spying scandal’s woman in the middle.”
To one side of Ohr, there is the Fusion GPS team, including fellow contractor Christopher Steele. To the other, there is husband Bruce Ohr, who, until his “dossier”-related demotion, was No. 4 man at the Department of Justice, and a key contact there for Steele.
As central as Nellie Ohr’s placement is, her role in the creation of the “dossier” remains undefined. For example, the House Intelligence Committee memo on related matters vaguely tells us that Nellie Ohr was “employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump”; the memo adds that Bruce Ohr “later provided the FBI with all of his wife’s opposition research.” Senator Lindsey Graham more sensationally told Fox News that Nellie Ohr “did the research for Mr. Steele,” but details remain scarce.
What’s more revealing about Nellie Ohr is the men in her life are protecting her involvement in the Russia scandal:
Notably, the “dossier” men in her life have tried to shield Ohr from public scrutiny, even at professional risk. Her husband, as the Daily Caller News Foundation reports, failed to disclose his wife’s employment with Fusion GPS and seek the appropriate conflict-of-interest waiver, which may have been an important factor in his demotion from associate deputy attorney general late last year.
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.