House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Doug Collins (R-GA) today released a transcript of the committee's August 2018 interview with senior Justice Department attorney Bruce Ohr, whom Republicans targeted for his relationship with Christopher Steele.
Ohr also is an expert in exposing Russian money laundering and organized crime.
Republicans considered Ohr, who served as a link between the dossier’s author and the FBI, to be a key witness in a probe they conducted last year of how federal law enforcement officials handled investigations surrounding Trump and his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton. While the House Judiciary and Oversight committees spoke with Ohr in August, Republicans are releasing the interview record just as Democrats are using their new House majority to investigate Trump for alleged obstruction of justice, public corruption, and abuse of power — an investigation the GOP believes is political overreach.
In spite of unwavering DOJ assertions to the contrary, Collins continues to insist the Justice Department relied on Steele's dossier to obtain FISA warrants to conduct surveillance on Trump associates.
Collins also added that the Ohr transcript would be the first of many that Judiciary Republicans planned to release in the coming weeks. He elected to release it without any redactions, despite the Justice Department having recommended certain parts of it be kept from public view, after panel lawmakers asked for their input.
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Ohr's transcript details his testimony about his contacts with Steele, which continued even after the FBI terminated its relationship with the former British spy, and how Ohr passed that information on to investigators. The transcript shows Ohr had doubts about the reliability of Steele’s information because of his Russian sources and financial sponsors, even as he was transmitting it to officials, but did not think it was improper to pass it along.
“When I receive information from Chris Steele I’m not going to sit on it. I’ve got to give it to the FBI,” the transcript shows Ohr said.
“As I saw it, I was receiving information that I passed to people who were working on the investigation,” Ohr said in the transcript. “They decided what to do with it. I don’t know what they did with it.”
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In the meantime, the release of the Ohr transcript pulls headlines from one of the most politically contentious chapters of the congressional panels’ probes back into the spotlight, particularly because of the newer details contained in the record.
“I thought that wild goose chase was over, so that’s a blast from the past,” senior Judiciary Committee Democrat Jamie Raskin (Md.) said Friday, adding that the release of Ohr’s transcript was “a completely irrelevant distraction fro the massive corruption that is surfacing in the Trump administration and the White House.”
CNN:
Ohr was demoted in December 2017 from his position as an associate deputy attorney general in part because he did not tell the department soon enough about his contacts with Steele, an ex-British intelligence official. But Ohr told Congress he was later stripped of another title the next month, running a Justice Department organized crime task force, for a different reason that came from then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein: the White House.
"I was told at the time that the attorney general and the deputy attorney general didn't want me in a position where I would be interacting directly with the White House," Ohr told the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees.
Bruce Ohr's testimony transcript
House Republicans release interview with Bruce Ohr, Justice Dept. official linked to Trump dossier (WaPo)
DOJ leaders did not want Bruce Ohr interacting with White House, testimony says (CNN)