Witch Hunt

by Gregg Jarrett

  The testimony of Ohr disproved another story that Representative Schiff kept selling to the American public—that Ohr had never told the FBI anything about Steele’s “dossier” until after the presidential election “in late November.”74 That was utterly untrue, and Schiff surely knew it. Ohr, McCabe, and Page all confirmed the July 30 meeting and the “dossier” discussion. FBI records attested to it. Those records also corroborate all the warnings issued by Ohr. Either Schiff didn’t care to do his homework, or, more likely, he sought to misrepresent the facts. Many in the media uncritically accepted Schiff’s version and propagated it as truth. It was not.

  More Meetings, More Warnings

  Given Steele’s acute bias and motivation to lie, given that his “dossier” seemed preposterous on its face and was completely unverified, and given that it was financed by the Clinton campaign and Democrats, the FBI should have approached the “dossier” with trepidation. Members of the intelligence community specializing in Russian affairs should have vetted the information, verifying what could be true. After all, it’s not possible that freelancers could have uncovered a conspiracy of that scale that US intelligence had not also run across.

  That failure may be the most important clue in how the mass delusion spread. A key part of any conspiracy theory is that what the public can see must be the tip of the iceberg. From reporters to pundits to the average voter, anyone who bought into the scam believed that the FBI wouldn’t have started all of it without having more than rumors to go on. That was one point that, until the Mueller Report dropped, both sides could agree on: it would be unprecedented, horrifying, and borderline insane for the FBI to have pushed the investigation for two years based on nothing at all. But the opposite happened; armed with the “dossier,” the FBI used it as a pretext to pursue Trump relentlessly. Credible and verified evidence didn’t seem to matter.

  As Steele and Simpson continued to push their inflammatory “dossier,” Ohr decided to disseminate it to others within the FBI and Justice Department. “I subsequently met with Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, and eventually Joe Pientka at the FBI,” said Ohr.75 Although he concealed from his superiors at the DOJ the fact that he was secretly acting as a conduit between Steele and the FBI, Ohr also elected to give the improbable intelligence to three prosecutors at the Justice Department in yet another meeting. That occurred within a few days of the FBI formally opening the Trump-Russia investigation on July 31. Ohr’s surprising admission came in the middle of his congressional testimony when he mentioned—almost as an aside—“I also provided this information to people in the criminal division, specifically Bruce Swartz, Zainab Ahmad, and Andrew Weissmann.”76

  Two of those individuals, Ahmad and Weissmann, were later hired by Robert Mueller to be part of his assembled team of special counsel prosecutors that escalated the investigation of Trump beyond the FBI and DOJ. They were also informed that the Clinton campaign and Democrats had paid for the Steele “dossier” through the company Fusion GPS and its founder, Glenn Simpson, who also employed Ohr’s wife. Here is Ohr’s testimony:

  QUESTION: So, the record is clear, what the Department of Justice and the FBI was aware of . . . was your relationship with Christopher Steele and Glenn Simpson, your wife’s relationship with Christopher Steele and Glenn Simpson, Mr. Steele’s bias against Donald Trump, Mr. Simpson’s bias against Donald Trump, your wife’s compensation for work for Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS, correct?

  (Discussion off the record.)

  OHR: Right.77

  They were also made aware that the Clinton campaign and the DNC had paid for the phony Russian information (or disinformation) that was intended to influence the election. Yet instead of investigating Clinton and her confederates for conspiring with foreigners to defraud the US government, the FBI used the Clinton-Russian “dossier” to target Trump despite a dearth of evidence that it was authentic. Thus, four members of Mueller’s special counsel team—Weissmann, Ahmad, Strzok, and Page—all knew as early as August 2016 when the investigation of Trump was initiated by the FBI that it was riven with prejudice and driven by a defective document. They deliberately disregarded the source of Steele’s funding and sought to exploit his “dossier.”

  Amazingly, Ohr was peddling the uncorroborated Steele document while benefiting from it financially. Since his wife was working on the anti-Trump “opposition research” documents, she was being paid by Fusion GPS, which was being subsidized by the Clinton campaign and Democrats. That money was being deposited into the Ohrs’ joint bank account at the same time Bruce Ohr was using his position at the DOJ to advance the false intelligence document. That created a disqualifying conflict of interest for Ohr. He was legally obligated under Justice Department regulations to recuse himself from any investigation in which his wife was involved. Ohr did not seek a waiver of that conflict. Instead, he omitted the information on all relevant forms and continued to act as the “conduit.”

  Upon joining the DOJ, he had signed an agreement stating that he would be fired if he violated its rules. Inexplicably, he was not terminated, which only reinforces the impression that impropriety and concealment continued at the highest levels of the department. Not only did Ohr fail to disclose that Fusion GPS was paying his wife, but it appears he did not fully report the nature of the work performed in financial disclosure reports as required under regulations.78 Willfully filing a false government report constitutes a crime under federal law—specifically 8 U.S.C. § 1001.79 It is also against the law to use a public office for personal financial gain. This runs afoul of the federal bribery and gratuity statutes, as well as the honest services fraud statute.80 Yet there appears to have been no known investigation of Ohr by the Justice Department, where he is still employed, although he was demoted when his advocacy in the “dossier” fiasco was made public. Amazingly, he was “awarded a $28,000 performance bonus while the Russia probe was ongoing,” according to DOJ records.81

  Perhaps motivated by money, Ohr moved aggressively in his role as facilitator. He agreed to meet in person with Glenn Simpson on August 22, 2016.82 At that point, the FBI’s investigation was not even a month old. Simpson pretended to be confident that Steele’s document was authentic and reliable, even though he had provided not a shred of proof or corroboration. He vouched for the credibility of Steele, not knowing that the former spy had been “admonished” by the FBI months earlier for reasons the Bureau has consistently refused to disclose.83 Steele would soon be fired by the FBI for leaking to the media and lying about it. He was declared “not suitable for use as a CHS [confidential human source].” His FBI “handler” advised that Steele should henceforth “not operate to obtain any intelligence whatsoever on behalf of the FBI.”84 Steele had proven to be deceitful and, hence, radioactive to the Bureau. Despite that, the FBI kept going back to Steele even after he was fired. (Also, even as the FBI was leaking like a sieve over the “dossier,” somehow Steele’s standing within the organization failed to leak.)

  During the August 22 meeting, Ohr listened as Simpson wove a tall tale of how Paul Manafort and Carter Page must be Russian assets engaged in an illicit scheme to rig the election. He couldn’t prove it, but the dots were there. All the FBI had to do was connect them. Simpson implored Ohr to pressure the FBI into taking swift action against Trump. If nothing else, the candidate was somehow guilty by association—of what, exactly, was left unstated.

  When Simpson testified before the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017, he denied that he had ever met with Ohr before the election:

  QUESTION: You’ve never heard from anyone in the U.S. Government in relation to those matters [the “dossier”], either the FBI or the Department of Justice?

  SIMPSON: After the election. I mean, during the election, no.85

  Simpson’s testimony was inaccurate and untruthful. Ohr’s testimony and his notes, including an email on the date of their liaison, August 22, show that he had met with Simpson more than two months prior to the election. Either the Fusion GPS fou
nder forgot about such an important meeting, during which he had disclosed the “dossier’s” contents, or he lied. That may further explain why Simpson subsequently invoked the Fifth Amendment when asked to appear again before Congress to explain his deceptive account of interactions with Ohr.86

  That was not the only instance in which Simpson is believed to have given false testimony. Senator Charles Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, recited another statement that Grassley described as “extremely misleading, if not an outright lie.”87 Citing the actions of Simpson, Fusion GPS, and Steele, Grassley and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department on January 4, 2018, demanding a comprehensive investigation into the apparent lies.88 (The standard here seems to be that false testimony related to Russia is a crime and a scandal when a Trump supporter does it but not when anyone else does.)

  A month after Ohr met with Simpson, Ohr met for a second time with Christopher Steele over breakfast at 8:00 a.m. at the Capital Hilton Hotel in Washington, DC. The date was September 23.89 The ex–British spy had been exceedingly busy. Days earlier, on September 19, he had flown to Rome to deliver even more memos in his “dossier” to his FBI “handler,” special agent Michael Gaeta. Gaeta, in turn, had forwarded them to the Bureau in Washington. During one meeting with Gaeta, attended by four agents flown in from Washington (in either September or October), Steele was offered a jaw-dropping $50,000 bonus if only he could verify with “solid corroboration” the information in his “dossier” that Trump was “colluding” with Russia to influence the election.90 That presented an insurmountable dilemma. The ex-spy could not possibly verify something that had never occurred. His information was derived from anonymous sources—assuming they even existed—and was based on multiple hearsays. In the end, Steele did not collect the bonus. But the offer of $50K by the FBI shows how desperate the Bureau was to verify the unverifiable and to damage Trump’s candidacy in the face of the fast-approaching presidential election. That failure to verify, however, did not seem to discourage either the FBI or Steele in the least.

  With every new “dossier” memo accusing Trump of “collusion,” Steele made doubly sure that they were passed on to both the FBI and Ohr at the DOJ. By late September, there was a total of eleven such memos. As before, Ohr promptly conveyed the latest Steele memos to FBI agent Joe Pientka, who was now assigned as Ohr’s “handler.” Pientka then dispatched the material to his Bureau partner, Peter Strzok, who was overseeing the Trump-Russia investigation.

  During the September 23 visit to the nation’s capital, Steele met with someone else in the US government: Jonathan Winer, a State Department official. When that surreptitious meeting was later exposed in the media, Winer penned a bizarre and nauseatingly self-aggrandizing op-ed in the Washington Post. He seemed to brag about his role as a facilitator of anti-Trump material.91 He described how it had worked: like a four-person Olympic relay team, Steele had dropped a digest of the “dossier” gossip off to Winer, who had handed it off to Nuland, who had then passed the baton on to Secretary of State John Kerry, who had apparently completed the final leg by racing it over the finish line to the FBI.92 Of course, the Bureau already had it, courtesy of Simpson, Ohr, and Gaeta.

  But Winer took it a step further; he also met with longtime Hillary Clinton friend and confidant Sidney Blumenthal, who had his hands on what became known as the “second dossier.”93 That equally dubious document peddled many of the same sordid stories about Trump’s purported “collusion” with Russia. It had been created, according to Winer, by Clinton ally Cody Shearer. At that point, a reverse relay was enacted as the information in the “second dossier” made its way to the FBI: Shearer to Blumenthal to Winer to Steele.94 It is quite likely that some of Shearer’s accusations against Trump were transcribed into the last few Steele memos, which were then passed on to the FBI.

  The comical stupidity of this scenario would make the fictional detective Sam Spade blush. It was inane. And so was the second treatment of “collusion,” which echoed some of the identical fantastic allegations as the original Steele-Simpson version—equally bereft of evidence or corroboration. It constituted a collection of rumors, innuendo, and wild conjecture. Special emphasis was placed on the notion that Trump had magically engineered the hacking of Democrats’ email accounts, including Blumenthal’s. Speculation supplanted facts. None of the accusations against Trump was authentic.

  This invites the question, just who is Cody Shearer? Mark Hemingway, a senior writer at The Weekly Standard, has followed the activities of Shearer and offered this assessment:

  It’s worth noting that Shearer is one of the most disreputable characters in Washington, and has been frequently connected to the most scandalous acts of the Clintons’ political careers. If Steele passed on information and/or allegations from Shearer to the FBI, and that information was acted on, it raises serious concerns about the impartiality and judgment of Steele and the FBI.95

  Steele did give Shearer’s “second dossier” to the FBI. Hemingway was also unsparing in his appraisal of Blumenthal, writing that “Blumenthal is a known liar and rumormonger so disreputable that the Obama White House put their foot down and nixed her [Clinton’s] attempt [to hire] Blumenthal at the State Department.”96

  Blumenthal and Shearer were not the only Clinton allies circulating the “collusion” canard. Perkins Coie lawyers for the DNC and Clinton campaign, who had hired Simpson to dig up dirt on Trump, were now passing information along to the FBI. Michael Sussmann, a partner at the firm, met with FBI general counsel James Baker on September 19, the first of several meetings. According to Baker’s testimony, he received a stack of papers and an electronic “disk” from Sussmann that constituted purported evidence of secret communications between Trump and Russians involving Alfa Bank in Moscow.97 Baker delivered the materials to Comey, McCabe, and Strzok. Like many of Steele’s other accusations, that one was subsequently proven to be false, but not before it had been fed to the media, including the New York Times and Slate, which published stories.98

  The Media Publicize the “Dossier”

  The scheme hatched by Simpson and Steele to distribute their phony “dossier” to the FBI and Justice Department was only the first part of their overarching strategy to damage Trump and buttress the candidacy of his opponent. To have an impact on the election, the document would need to be fed to the ravenous anti-Trump media in advance of the election. Simpson, a former reporter, orchestrated the ensuing meetings with numerous journalists he knew. Steele, as an ex–intelligence agent, attended many of them to add the imprimatur of legitimacy to the supposed “intelligence” they were selling. The journalists, predisposed to run with negative stories on Trump, were informed that government law enforcement was already in possession of the same document, giving the reporters an excuse to author articles on the accusations contained therein even though none of them had been verified as true. That crafty calculus paid off as stories began to emerge alleging that Trump was “colluding” with Russia to win the presidency.

  Steele met with Michael Isikoff of Yahoo! News, who published an article on September 23, 2016, repeating an allegation that Carter Page had “opened up private communications with Senior Russian officials,” and discussed the lifting of economic sanctions.99 The story stated that the Trump foreign policy adviser had met with two Russians who were mentioned in Steele’s memos and connected Page to “suspected efforts by Moscow to influence the presidential election.”100 The Clinton campaign called it a “bombshell report” and sought widespread distribution. The campaign published a thumping screed on Trump-Russian “collusion” while concealing from everyone that it had secretly funded the fabrications. Blasting it out to millions of voters, the campaign accused her rival of “an action that could directly enrich both Trump and Page while undermining American interests.”101 Without using the word “treason,” Clinton all but accused Trump of being a traitor. It was not true, of course. That did not stop the FBI and D
OJ from using Isikoff’s story to obtain a warrant to wiretap Page, even though the reporter’s source was the same source—Steele—that was cited for the bulk of the warrant application. The judges were never informed of that and were led to believe that there were separate sources to justify the wiretap. All this will be discussed in the next chapter.

  The Isikoff story was just the opening salvo in an all-out assault against Trump by the corrupt triumvirate of Simpson, Steele, and the media. The two men behind the imaginary “dossier” also briefed CNN, Mother Jones, BuzzFeed News, ABC News, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Yorker, Politico, and other news organizations that saw huge traffic numbers in allegations about a presidential nominee from extremely trustworthy, high-level sources. Simpson and Steele weren’t that, which was why it was so important to be able to say the FBI was investigating the matter. No credible journalist would report on the “dossier” as truth. What was needed were respected journalists who would write a story saying that respectable people were talking about the “dossier.”

  One of the more damaging stories on Trump was published by David Corn of Mother Jones, who had been given a copy of Steele’s “dossier.” Corn’s October 31, 2016, article gained widespread attention just one week before Americans went to the polls to cast their ballots. He asked, “Does this mean that the FBI is investigating whether Russian intelligence has attempted to develop a secret relationship with Trump or cultivate him as an asset?”102 Corn identified his source as “a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence.” That, of course, was Steele. Corn described him as “a credible source with a proven record of providing reliable, sensitive, and important information to the US government.”103