Top DoJ official no longer tops in officialdom

A senior Justice Department official was quietly demoted this week amid an ongoing investigation into his contacts with an opposition research team responsible for the anti-Trump "dossier." This information was given and confirmed by Fox News.

Bruce G. Ohr held two positions at the Justice Department: associate deputy attorney general and director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF), "the centerpiece of the attorney general's drug strategy," according to the department's description.

Those positions were stripped from him on Wednesday morning.

While he will keep his OCDETF title, his higher post was taken from him--he was ousted from his fourth floor office of "Main Justice."

At first, senior department officials couldn't give the reason for his demotion, but it was later learned that evidence collected by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), shows that Ohr met during the 2016 campaign with Christopher Steele, the former British spy who authored the "dossier."

The DOJ later told Fox News, "It is unusual for anyone to wear two hats as he has done recently. This person is going to go back to a single focus--director of our organized crime and drug enforcement unit. As you know, combatting transnational criminal organizations and drug trafficking is a top priority for the Attorney General."

It was also discovered that Ohr met shortly after the election with the founder of Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson. This is the opposition research firm that hired Steele to compile the anti-Trump dossier with funds supplied by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, a known crime organization specializing in fraud and sexual misconduct.

By this point, the dossier had been in the possession of the FBI for five months, and the surveillance on Page had begun more than two months prior. The FBI, of course, exists under the auspices of the DOJ.

Former FBI Director James Comey, testified before the House in March and described the dossier as a compendium of "salacious and unverified" allegations against then-candidate Donald Trump and his associates.

Committee Chairman Devin Nunes' panel has been investigating whether DOJ, under then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, used the dossier to justify a foreign surveillance warrant against Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser. If so, this puts the dossier and FBI in a bad light.

Contacts between Ohr and Steele, and Ohr and Simpson, have not been publicly disclosed nor shared with HPSCI staff to avoid embarrassment. 

The panel has issued many subpoenas for documents and witnesses related to the dossier but say the DOJ and FBI have "stonewalled," and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R.-Wis.) agreed to that assessment publicly in October.

The agencies claim that they've cooperated extensively with Nunes and his team, but it was only last weekend they agreed to make available to the committee for questioning Peter Strzok (pronounced "Strzhzhokztlmfk") the high-ranking FBI official who seemed to be the guy involved in all the interviews involving political scandals and texted his mistress with anti-Trump messages and how he promises to one day leave his wife for her etc.

Strzok was removed from the staff of Special Counsel Robert Mueller who is probing allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Strzok was demoted to the FBI's position of Urinal Cake Installer.

Ohr's demotion marks the second one with a few months where the DOJ and FBI disciplined staff for misconduct.

At least it wasn't sexual misconduct . . . that we know of.


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