by Tom Fitton
On December 8, 2014, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for European Affairs Paul Jones suggests to Special Coordinator for Libya Jonathan Winer that he “flip” reports from Steele’s firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, to a more secure email system, “given our ongoing concerns about security of opennet…”
Jones added, “We just want to be sure we don’t inadvertently undermine a very good source of info or worse.” Winer responds, “Flipping to the high side will result in delays whenever the reporting takes place and I am out of the office, which includes weekends plus when I am overseas.…” Then assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland replies, “Let’s do high side.”
Winer replies that he would “have [his assistant] Nina Miller send them to you on my behalf high side.… I will send them to her from my non-State email account, not copying myself. She will then send them to us. You know who they are coming from, so even high side from here I will just refer to them as ‘O Reports,’ and strip out any other identifying information as to sourcing.”
On February 9, 2016, a heavily redacted email exchange with the subject “Urgent—[redacted]” begins with an email from Justin Siberell, former principal deputy coordinator of the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau, to multiple senior State Department officials including Winer. In this exchange, Siberell mentions that they are “meeting later today with OSD/SOLIC [redacted].” OSD/SOLIC is the office run by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict.
Siberell notes that the “DOD will work on press guidance and a strategic messaging plan that will be cleared with/through State,” which implies that it is a matter of public relations concern.
Later in the redacted discussion, Winer changes the distribution list and writes, “For this group only—[redacted].” Secretary John Kerry’s chief of staff Jonathan Finer responds, “As Jonathan predicted [redacted].”
One of the other recipients, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Europe John Heffern, then forwards the entire exchange to two colleagues, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western Europe Conrad Tribble and then office director for Western European affairs, Robin Quinville, saying, “Do not circulate widely.”
Tribble replies the next day asking Heffern and Quinville, “Anything further on this? No real action for EUR [State Department’s Bureau of Europe and Eurasian Affairs] yet, but obviously of some concern.”
No wonder Jonathan Winer, Steele’s ally at the State Department, refused to talk to the DOJ inspector general who investigated the Russiagate/Obamagate affair. He seems to have circumvented the rules in pushing Steele’s unreliable reports to his Obama State Department colleagues. Our lawsuits have documented that the Obama-Kerry State Department was a hotbed of anti-Trump activity. Attorney General William Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham would do well to focus like a laser on the State Department.
Again, the State Department was a center of the Obamagate storm: Steele had an extensive and close working relationship dating back to May 2014 with high-ranking Obama State Department officials including Winer and Nuland. And less than a month before the presidential inauguration Winer had a ten-minute phone call with Alexey Vladimirovich Skosyrev, the “political chief” at the Russian embassy in Washington, DC.
Another mail exchange between Nuland and Winer discussed a “face-to-face” meeting on a “Russian matter” in New York in September 2016.
Again, Winer was even approached by a movie producer about making a movie about the Russiagate targeting of President Trump.
No surprise to us that some in Hollywood are willing to team up with the Deep State to take down President Trump. And the State Department’s role in the assault on President Trump wouldn’t end with the Obama administration; it would continue with his holdovers during the Trump administration and culminate, as we’ll see later, in the outrageous impeachment attack on the president.
BRUCE AND NELLIE OHR—THE “BONNIE AND CLYDE” OF THE ATTEMPT TO TAKE DOWN TRUMP
Bruce and Nellie Ohr were and are a very infamous and compromised couple—by anyone’s standards. Bruce Ohr is a senior official in the Justice Department whose wife, Nellie, was hired by Fusion GPS to assist with its dossier work against then-candidate Trump. In an outrageous conflict of interest, Bruce Ohr worked closely with both Nellie Ohr and her fellow Clinton campaign spies at Fusion GPS, including Christopher Steele, to launder Russia smears against President Trump into the DOJ and FBI. He was subsequently “demoted” from his position as U.S. associate deputy attorney general in December 2017 after his conflicts of interest were “discovered.”
For instance we found 330 (!) pages of Justice Department documents showing Bruce Ohr discussing information obtained through his wife, Nellie Ohr. This information contained anti-Trump dossier materials, including a spreadsheet that tries to link President Trump to dozens of Russians.7
Remember: Nellie Ohr worked for Hillary Clinton through Fusion GPS.
On December 5, 2016, Bruce Ohr emailed himself an Excel spreadsheet, seemingly from his wife, Nellie Ohr, titled “WhosWho19Sept2016.” The spreadsheet purports to show relationship descriptions and “linkages” between Donald Trump, his family, and criminal figures, many of whom were Russians. This list of individuals allegedly “linked to Trump” include: a Russian involved in a “gangland killing”8; an Uzbek mafia don; a former KGB officer suspected in the murder of Paul Tatum; a Russian who reportedly “buys up banks and pumps them dry”; a Russian money launderer for Sergei Magnitsky; a Turk accused of shipping oil for ISIS; a couple who lent their name to the Trump Institute, promoting its “get-rich-quick schemes”; a man who poured him a drink; and others.
On December 5, 2016, Bruce Ohr emailed himself a document titled “Manafort Chronology,” another Nellie Ohr–Fusion GPS document, which details Paul Manafort’s travel and interactions with Russians and other officials.
FBI interview reports from December 5 and December 12, and December 20, 2017, show that Bruce Ohr “voluntarily” gave these anti-Trump and Manafort materials, created for the Clinton campaign by Fusion GPS, to the FBI.
On January 25, 2017, Bruce Ohr’s wife, Nellie Ohr, forwarded text messages to him that she’d sent to her “colleagues,” where she refers to the Steele dossier as the “yellow rain dossier” and the “yellow showers dossier.”
In the same set of forwarded texts, Nellie speculates that Department K of the Russian intelligence service FSB “would be a pretty good candidate for listening in on Hillary.”
On February 14, 2017, Obama appointed and then deputy assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, Kathleen Kavalec, forwarded Ohr a Huffington Post article touting the Steele Dossier’s claim that an alleged deal between Russian oil company Rosneft and Trump supporter Steve Schwarzman constituted a “high crime of treason worthy of impeachment.” Ohr forwarded the article to the FBI’s Washington field office the same day.
Remember, four months prior to this exchange, Kavalec had found Christopher Steele not credible because of factual inaccuracies that he had relayed to her in October 2016!
Nellie Ohr seems to have been a go-to source for Ohr’s buddies at DOJ. Fusion GPS hit pay dirt by hiring her. On May 23, 2016, DOJ prosecutor Lisa Holtyn emails Bruce Ohr to see if he could connect her as well as prosecutors Joe Wheatley and Ivana Nizich with his wife, Nellie Ohr, as she could be a “great resource” for them. He replies, “I’m sure Nellie would be delighted to speak with them. I’m pretty sure there is no conflict of interest since they aren’t paying her or anything like that.” Congressman Mark Meadows suggested this email shows that Nellie Ohr “knowingly provided false testimony” to Congress that she had no role in DOJ investigations.
These documents show a crazed DOJ-FBI effort to use the Clinton spy ring at Fusion GPS, namely Nellie Ohr, to smear President Trump—even before he was sworn in as president. Clinton campaign operative Nellie Ohr may as well have had a desk at the Justice Department.
Here is some recent history on our discoveries about the Ohrs.
We received documents showing that Bruce Ohr in his January 2018 preparation to testify to the Senate and House intelligence committees wrote to a lawyer about “possible ethics concerns.” Bruce Ohr forwarded the email to Nellie Ohr, who had been hired by Fusion GPS, the Hillary Clinton campaign–Democratic National Committee vendor who compiled the anti-Trump dossier.
We also uncovered key documents, discussed below, showing he remained in regular contact with former British spy and Fusion GPS contractor Christopher Steele after Steele was terminated by the FBI in November 2016 for revealing to the media his position as an FBI confidential informant.
As you can see, we’re still uncovering the sordid details of this attempted coup d’état.
NELLIE OHR PUSHES ANTI-TRUMP DISINFORMATION
As discussed above, Bruce and Nellie Ohr trafficked in salacious gossip of the worst kind in their effort to topple a U.S. president.
How bad? Really bad.
As in Russian bad.
We have yet another batch of details in the form of seventy-two pages of DOJ documents containing Russia-related emails sent from Nellie Ohr to DOJ official Lisa Holtyn (whom Bruce Ohr supervised!) at the time Nellie Ohr worked with anti-Trump dossier firm Fusion GPS.9
In an email to Holtyn dated November 22, 2016, revealing her anti-Trump sentiments, Nellie poses a question in the subject line: “Who stands behind the Russian ‘friends of Trump,’ ” which she answers enthusiastically in the first line of the email: “Pornographer-turned-pro-Kremlin-media-impresario Konstantin Rykov!!!”
The documents show that Nellie Ohr was providing the Justice Department significant amounts of information on Russia via email from January 2016 to November 2016. She testified to Congress that she worked as a contractor for Fusion GPS in “October of 2015, give or take a couple weeks, and into the end of September 2016.” Much of the material Ohr sent to the DOJ is untranslated Russia-language reports.
Once again, Fusion GPS is the firm paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to create the anti-Trump dossier.
The documents show Nellie Ohr’s providing Justice Department officials much the same kind of open-source research and investigative services she was paid to provide Fusion GPS.
Nellie Ohr told Congress that she worked at Fusion GPS on “a project looking into the relationship of Donald Trump with [Russian] organized crime,” for which she would “write occasional reports based on the open source research that I described about Donald Trump’s relationships with various people in Russia.” She also testified she gathered information during the 2016 campaign about Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Carter Page, President Trump, his wife, Melania Trump, and his children for Fusion GPS.
Nellie Ohr funneled anti-Trump smears to her husband’s underlings in the DOJ, who were running an illicit spy operation against President Trump.
Nellie Ohr is obviously a key figure in the Clinton–DNC–Fusion GPS spy ring. More than that, she may have also worked with her husband to delete critically important material
NELLIE OHR TAKES HINT FROM HILLARY TO: DELETE, DELETE, DELETE
When the wife of a top Justice Department official tells her husband that she’s “deleting these emails now,” it may well be innocent. But when both of them are up to their necks in plotting against a president of the United States, this potential destruction of evidence needs to be investigated.
In May 2019, we released records from the Justice Department that included an email exchange between Ohr; his top aide Lisa Holtyn; his wife, Nellie Ohr, who worked for Fusion GPS; and First Secretary at the German Embassy Stefan Bress. The email discusses a meeting with German analysts for an “analytical exchange” on topics including the “Impact of Russian influence operations in Europe (‘PsyOps/InfoWar’).”
According to the emails, Bress had initiated the offer of the meeting to which Holtyn responds, “I haven’t had a chance to confer with Bruce yet, but would certainly love to meet with the ‘A Team’!” Bruce Ohr says, “That time works for me as well.” Bress then provides the personal details/passport numbers of the German analysts who will be meeting with Holtyn and Ohr. Holtyn tells Bress that the Ohrs would like to host the German delegation for dinner and notes that Joe Wheatley and Ivana Nizich (a husband/wife team of DOJ Organized Crime prosecutors, and friends of the Ohrs) would join them as well.
Included in that email exchange were records revealing that Nellie Ohr informed her husband that she was deleting emails sent from his DOJ email account. Here’s the smoking gun:
From: Nellie Ohr
Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2016 12:49 PM
To: Ohr, Bruce (ODAG)
Subject: Re: Analyst Russian Organized Crime—April 2016
Thanks! I’m deleting these emails now
Here’s the crucial question: Was Bruce Ohr directing his wife, Nellie Ohr, who worked for the Clinton spy ring at Fusion GPS, to delete emails about Russia?
We are on top of this scandal with several smoking gun disclosures.
In August 2019, we released FBI 302 interviews with Bruce Ohr showing the efforts of the FBI, DOJ, and State Department to find allegedly incriminating material about President Trump through communications with Fusion GPS and Clinton-funded dossier author Christopher Steele. Also released were documents containing Russia-related emails sent from Nellie Ohr to Holtyn during the time Nellie Ohr worked with Fusion GPS.
In June 2019 we uncovered documents showing the removal of Bruce Ohr from the position of associate attorney general in 2017; his transfer from the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force to International Affairs in 2018; and that Ohr received a total of $42,520 in performance bonuses during the Trump/Russia investigation. Ohr’s bonus nearly doubled from $14,520 (received in November 2015) to $28,000 in November 2016.
Apparently, there is good money to be made in selling out your president.
BRUCE OHR PLAYED ANTI-TRUMP SPYMASTER
To get a full understanding of the scope of the desperate Obama administration plotting against Donald Trump, you first have to look at the corrupt relationship with Clinton-DNC spy Christopher Steele. Judicial Watch uncovered that Steele was not only a source for the Obama FBI but a paid source!
More than two years ago, our litigation and investigative team uncovered an extraordinary cache of documents that show that Steele was cut off as a “Confidential Human Source” (CHS) after he disclosed his relationship with the FBI to a third party. The documents show at least eleven FBI payments to Steele in 2016 and document that he was admonished for unknown reasons in February 2016.
The documents include a “source closing communication” that states that Steele (referred to below as “CHS”) “is being closed” because:
CHS confirmed to an outside third party that CHS has a confidential relationship with the FBI. CHS was used as a source for an online article. In the article, CHS revealed CHS’ relationship with the FBI as well as information that CHS obtained and provided to FBI. On November 1, 2016, CHS confirmed all of this to the handling agent. At that time, handling agent advised CHS that the nature of the relationship between the FBI and CHS would change completely and that it was unlikely that the FBI would continue a relationship with the CHS. Additionally, handling agent advised that CHS was not to operate to obtain any intelligence whatsoever on behalf of the FBI.
The documents also show that Steele was paid repeatedly by the FBI and was “admonished” for some unknown misconduct in February 2016. The documents include:
Fifteen (15) FD-1023, Source Reports.
Thirteen (13) FD-209a, Contact Reports.
Eleven (11) FD-794b, Payment Requests. (It appears Steele was paid money eleven of the thirteen times he met with the FBI and gave them information.)
An Electronic Communication (EC) documenting that on February 2, 2016, Steele was admonished in accordance with standard Justice Department guidelines and the FBI CHS Poli
cy Manual.
These documents show the shady, cash-based relationship the Obama FBI had with Clinton operative Christopher Steele. The anti-Trump Russia “investigation” had Steele at its center and his misconduct was no impediment to using information from his Russia intelligence collaborators to spy on the Trump team. The corruption and abuse is astonishing.
But it gets worse.
The Steele Dossier garbage wasn’t panning out and the Deep State FBI was desperate to try to reestablish a relationship with Steele in order to continue to get more shady information on the incoming president. And they found a willing—and compromised—go-between in Ohr. Our friends at the Washington Examiner analyzed our material in a story titled “FBI used Steele dossier in FISAs despite knowing about flaws and bias.”
Following a November 2016 meeting with Ohr, the interviewing FBI agents wrote that Ohr told them Steele “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being the U.S. President.” Ohr said he believed Steele “wanted to blunt or foil the Kremlin’s plans.” Steele’s explicit motivations were also not made clear to the FISA court.
Ohr told agents in November 2016 he “never believed” Steele was “making up information or shading it” and that he believed Steele was just passing along what his sources in Russia were telling him, but added “that doesn’t make that story true.” And Ohr raised the specter of possible Russian disinformation, noting “there are always Russian conspiracy theories that come from the Kremlin” and providing a redacted example.10
By January 2017, some FBI agents trying to verify the dossier’s allegations had reportedly concluded some of the dossier’s contents may have been based upon rumors and hearsay passed from source to source and originated as Russian disinformation. Former CIA Moscow station chief Daniel Hoffman told the Washington Examiner the dossier likely contained “FSB disinformation.”