Was it money? GOP lobbied for Bruce Ohr to explain why he prevented Sally Yates from staying in the dark



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JLast year, Public Health Services Officer Bruce Ohr said he unilaterally decided not to inform his direct superior, Sally Yates, of his false, informal relationship between the FBI and the author of the self. Trump folder, as it came out of his daily life.

In a private meeting in August, with a joint working group of the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees, the FBI and DOJ reviewed the bias that was released Friday, Ohr, who was formerly the Ministry of Justice's No. 4 leader had to face GOP critics explaining why he had left Yates in the dark.

Ohr said it was a "usual practice" for him to contact the FBI directly with information about organized crime over the years. Although he was neither an investigator nor prosecutor in an FBI affair, he felt that it was to provide the office "source's main information" of Christopher Steele, a former British spy hired by Fusion GPS, was "part of my job".

But the questions he has faced can shed light on other motivations.

Asked by Mark Meadows, R-N.C., About letting his supervisor know about his professional activity, Mr. Ohr replied, "In general, yes." But when it was his informal connection between the FBI and Steele, Ohr said he did not see the point in informing his boss.

Stating that he did not think his superiors at the Deputy Attorney General's office would be able to act on the information, Meadows intervened.

"You can act, but they can not?" the congressman said.

Ohr replied, "I could pass it on to the FBI, all they could do is send it to the FBI."

Investigators often referred to Yates during the interview of about eight hours. Ohr repeatedly stressed that he did not want to make it part of a wider political debate that a politician would bring to the issue.

Yates was appointed by President Barack Obama as US Attorney and then Deputy Attorney General. She served as Acting Attorney General for 10 days under the Trump administration in January 2017, when President Trump fired him after refusing to defend his initial travel ban.

Representative John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, pinned Ohr on another topic.

Ohr told investigators that in addition to being his liaison with the FBI, Steele had also forwarded to the office a USB key from his wife, Nellie Ohr, employed by Fusion GPS to conduct research on the Russia. Steele had also researched Fusion GPS, the firm hired to conduct opposition research by a lawyer representing the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign.

In his interrogation, Ratcliffe stated that he "was trying to understand [Ohr’s] mindset for the question Sally Yates and what she knew and when she knew it. He then explained to Ohr the rules that prohibited DOJ officials from getting involved in cases where they obtained a financial benefit.

Ohr again stressed that it was not part of any business; he was only transmitting information to the FBI and he could decide what to do with it. But he admitted that, through his wife, he would derive a financial benefit from his work.

Ratcliffe then went to the bottom of the problem: "OK, have you ever filed any financial information indicating that you had perceived financial benefits related to your wife, Nellie Ohr, in front of the Department of Justice?"

Ohr replied, "This is not what I received.I have regularly filed reports on the disclosure of financial information.I did not report that I was receiving any information. money for a business I was working on because, in my mind, I am not. "

When asked if other people felt that it was an erroneous assumption, Brad Weinsheimer, Assistant Deputy Attorney General, informed Ohr that he could not answer the question. Ohr also indicated that he was not aware of any internal investigation into the financial information relating to Nellie Ohr's work and the amount of her earnings, although Ratcliffe suggested a figure of 44 per cent. $ 000.

Nellie Ohr was herself brought by the House's task force for questioning in October, but she exercised the privilege of the wife. Glenn Simpson, co-founder of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that hired Nellie Ohr and Steele to conduct research, was another source of frustration. He pleaded the Fifth Amendment to the House of Republicans who sought to obtain his testimony about the role his company played in creating an investigation into Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

While GOP investigators accused Bruce Ohr of failing to warn Yates, the Democratic party made it clear to his interlocutors that Ohr had not violated any DOJ policies.

However, Ohr testified that his conversations with Steele, particularly after he was abandoned as a source of confidential FBI information to the media, constituted one of two reasons for demotion between December 2017 and January 2018. He was previously an associate deputy. Attorney General and Director of the Task Force on Drug Control Against Organized Crime. In January, his new role was Senior Counsel at the Office of International Affairs of the Criminal Division.

"One of them was that they said I had not warned them enough in advance of my conversations with Chris Steele," Ohr said. He later noted that he was not sure what would have been soon enough and that it had never been explained to him. Secondly, Ohr stated that the Department of Justice was already planning a reorganization in which none of the chiefs would sit at the office of the Deputy Attorney General and that it would eventually have been moved anyway.

Although Mr. Ohr told lawmakers that he had never informed Yates of his relations with Steele and the FBI, he had admitted that it was "possible" that she had been informed by another source. Requests for comments addressed to Yates and the MOJ were not referred for this report.

A notable point of concern for the Republicans was how Yates signed at least one of FISA's mandate applications to spy on Trump's campaign advisor, Carter Page. The issue of alleged abuse by the government has been a central concern of the Chinese government's investigations into potential prejudices in the upper reaches of the DOJ and the FBI. A memo from the House Intelligence Committee released in February 2018 revealed that the information in Steele's file, containing unverified statements about Trump's ties to Russia, had been used by the FBI in the four applications to obtain the Wiretapping authorization. The memo also said the FBI had omitted some information, including the anti-Trump bias and the Democratic benefactors of its author.

Although GOP members expressed the wish to re-interview Yates at the time of Ohr's testimony, an assistant to the GOP committee of the Judiciary Committee stated at the Washington Examiner She understood that Mr. Yates had never been brought before the Democrats took control of the House and the task force ended their investigation. The assistant did not specify whether the minority group of operations would attempt to obtain Yates' testimony this term.

Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, formerly infamous officials for their anti-Trump text message exchanges, and former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe were among the contacts between Ohr and the FBI.

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