Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller today looks at the employment of Nellie Ohr, wife of Department of Justice (DoJ) official Bruce Ohr, by the political hit-squad firm Fusion GPS under a contract with the Clinton campaign. From the article:
“The financial arrangement between Mrs. Ohr and Fusion GPS gives the appearance of government-for-hire,” said Tom Anderson, an ethics expert at the conservative-leaning watchdog group the National Legal and Policy Center. It “appears to be a sophisticated scheme to get access to the highest levels of our government … ensuring the use of government resources in an attempt to influence an election.”
A memo created and released by the House Intelligence Committee last week detailed how the “dossier,” produced by Fusion GPS- operative Christopher Steele, was used by the FBI as the basis for an successful application to a court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to spy on the Trump campaign. From the memo:
Before and after Steele was terminated as a source, he maintained contact with DOJ via then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, a senior DOJ official who worked closely with Deputy Attorneys General Yates and later Rosenstein. Shortly after the election, the FBI began interviewing Ohr, documenting his communications with Steele. For example, in September 2016, Steele admitted to Ohr his feelings against then-candidate Trump when Steele said he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” This clear evidence of Steele’s bias was recorded by Ohr at the time and subsequently in official FBI files—but not reflected in any of the Page FISA applications.
Also from the memo:
During this same time period, Ohr’s wife was employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump. Ohr later provided the FBI with all of his wife’s opposition research, paid for by the DNC and Clinton campaign via Fusion GPS. The Ohrs’ relationship with Steele and Fusion GPS was inexplicably concealed form the FISC.
As Rosiak points out:
Parties seeking to hide ethically questionable payments often write the checks to a family member. Since spouses generally share assets, payments to one benefit the other, and paying the spouse can make the payments less obvious or harder to trace.
Even if the facts in the memo are interpreted in their most innocent fashion, you still have a scandal bigger than Watergate. From the reaction of many liberals to the memo, it is clear that they will never allow Donald Trump to be a victim. But that is exactly what he is.
The scariest part of this is not that the party in power used the FBI to attempt to rig an election but that they almost got away with it. Trump’s election was possibly the most unlikely in American history. If Hillary Clinton had won, none of this would had ever seen the light of day.
Of course, the GOP memo raises even larger questions, like whether transcripts of wiretaps of Trump campaign officials were shared with the Clinton campaign. We need a special prosecutor assigned to determine the full of extent of FBI interference in the 2016 election.