President Trump and his congressional allies have singled out senior Justice Department attorney Bruce Ohr as someone worth attacking for his alleged role in the Russia investigation.
But Ohr has little to do with the probe itself, and his almost 30 years' experience fighting Russian organized crime makes it even more suspicious the president would want to punish him.
In nearly three decades at the Justice Department, Mr. Ohr has made a career of supporting and facilitating important cases that targeted Russian organized crime. Now he is a target of President Trump, who has put his security clearance under review and attacked him publicly, and allies. They have cast Mr. Ohr and his wife — who worked as a contractor at the same research firm that produced a damaging dossier of information about Mr. Trump — as villains, part of a pro-Clinton cabal out to destroy the president.
But Mr. Ohr, 56, is far from corrupt, friends and former colleagues said. An experienced law enforcement official, he has a deep understanding of the underworld of Russian organized crime, they said, including raising concerns about at least one oligarch whose name has resurfaced amid the scrutiny of contacts between Trump associates and Russia.
Ohr was pulled into the political saga due to years-long relationships he had developed with former British spy Christopher Steele and with Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who helped launch a global research firm called Fusion GPS.
“I met Bruce … through organized crime conferences or something like that,” Simpson told the House Intelligence Committee last year.
Ohr was a ranking official in the deputy attorney general’s office and had become the director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, the hub of the Justice Department’s efforts to crack down on drug trafficking and foreign cartels.
Meanwhile, Ohr’s wife, a Russian linguist named Nellie, was hired by Simpson’s firm to help with its research. Trump has attacked her by name as well.
Those connections have upended Mr. Ohr’s once relatively anonymous life, dragging him into the maelstrom of the Russia investigation. Justice Department officials transferred Mr. Ohr, an associate deputy attorney general, to a less powerful post last year after learning about his contacts with Mr. Steele and the scope of his wife’s work. If he loses his security clearance, he would probably be forced to leave federal law enforcement after nearly three decades.
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Mr. Ohr was a manager, not a litigator, who built bridges with law enforcement agencies around the world, former Justice Department officials said. He sent top deputies to Hungary to root out the nascent Russian mob in the early 2000s. F.B.I. agents viewed the commitment as a sign of his seriousness about combating Russian organized crime.
In 2006, Mr. Ohr was part of a group of government officials who revoked the visa of Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire and aluminum magnate. Officials were concerned that Mr. Deripaska might try to come to the United States to launder illicit profits through real estate, a former law enforcement official said.
Mr. Deripaska, a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, has been tied to the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was convicted last week of tax and bank fraud.
When the FBI terminated its formal relationship with Steele in 2016 for speaking to the media, agents still wanted to work with him and used Ohr as an intermediary.
While the F.B.I. could no longer consider him a confidential informant, former officials said, agents eager to assess the dossier as part of their counterintelligence investigation into links between Trump associates and Russia’s election interference could still document what he was telling a third party — Mr. Ohr.
And when Mr. Ohr approached the F.B.I. about his relationship with Mr. Steele, bureau officials saw an opportunity.
Mr. Ohr met with Mr. Steele almost a dozen times beginning in late 2016 through May 2017, according to congressional officials. F.B.I. agents interviewed Mr. Ohr after the meetings and documented the information.
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Conservatives have also targeted Ms. Ohr, whose contract work at Fusion GPS involved monitoring Russian news media and compiling connections between Mr. Trump and Russia from public documents. She did not work on the dossier, according to a person familiar with her work for Fusion GPS.
Mr. Ohr still has a job at the Justice Department, though he is functionally no longer a manager. It is unclear how long that will last. Mr. Trump has called for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to fire Mr. Ohr.
“It seems that Bruce had two sins: He met with Chris Steele and his wife worked for Fusion GPS. None of that seems wrong to me,” Mr. Lowrie said. “Bruce is a straight arrow. He was totally nonpartisan, as we all were expected” to be.
Bruce Ohr Fought Russian Organized Crime. Now He’s a Target of Trump. (NYT)
He went around his DOJ bosses, but Bruce Ohr offered little to Russia probe, sources say (ABC News)