Killing the Deep State. Jerome R. Corsi. Ph.D.

Nellie Ohr

      The Mueller investigation was rocked once again in early December, when the DOJ announced a very senior official, Bruce Ohr, had been demoted. Until being demoted, Ohr held two titles at DOJ: associate deputy attorney general, a position that put him four doors down on the fourth floor of “Main Justice” from his boss, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and a second position as director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, a program described by DOJ as “the centerpiece of the attorney’s general’s drug strategy.”11

      Ohr was demoted after evidence collected by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Representative Devin Nunes, a Republican from California, revealed that Ohr had met during the 2016 presidential campaign with Christopher Steele, the British intelligence agent at the center of the controversy surrounding an opposition research dossier prepared against candidate Donald Trump. Additionally, House Intelligence Committee investigators have determined that Ohr met shortly after the election with Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that hired Steele to complete the dossier with funds supplied by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.12 The payments to Fusion GPS from the Clinton campaign and the DNC were made indirectly, laundered as legal payments to the Seattle-based law firm Perkins Coie, a longtime advisor to Democratic Party politicians, including President Barack Obama.

      As will be more completely discussed in chapter 7, the FBI embraced the Fusion GPS dossier despite a body of evidence suggesting its research into the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia was flawed by the same anti-Trump bias that appears to have permeated the top echelons of the FBI and the DOJ, casting doubts on the integrity of Mueller’s special counsel investigation. From published reports, Strzok, then acting in his counterintelligence position, was the FBI official who first took possession in the Fusion GPS Russia dossier, possibly as early as five months before the November 2016 election.

      According to Fox News senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano, the FBI appears to have offered the former British spy Christopher Steele $50,000 if he could corroborate the Fusion GPS findings.13 Appearing before the House Intelligence Committee on December 13, 2017, Deputy Director Rosenstein refused to answer directly as to whether the FBI used the Fusion GPS Russia dossier as the basis to obtain a warrant from the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to conduct electronic surveillance on members of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.14 If the Fusion GPS Russia dossier proves to have included false information derogatory to Trump, the FBI’s use of the document runs the risk of compromising Mueller’s Russia investigation, especially if the FBI used the Fusion GPS dossier as the basis for obtaining court-authorized approval to conduct electronic surveillance on members of the Trump campaign.

      Bruce Ohr was demoted not only because he refused to disclose his meeting with Steele and Simpson over the Fusion GPS dossier to the FBI but also because he failed to disclose that his wife, Nellie Ohr, was hired by Fusion GPS to work on the Russia dossier. It turns out that Fusion GPS put Nellie on the payroll because of her obvious close ties to the FBI and because she is a Russian speaker with ties to the CIA who holds advanced academic degrees in Russian literature and history.

      Federal Communications Commission records also document that Nellie Ohr obtained an amateur ham radio license on May 23, 2016, after she was hired by Fusion GPS.15 Those investigating Nellie Ohr’s role in the controversy suggest she might have done so to communicate “outside the normal risk of communication intercepts” with Christopher Steele, the British intelligence agent responsible for producing the Fusion GPS opposition research dossier on Donald Trump and/or with various sources in Russia that Steele was utilizing to develop the opposition research he planned to use to sink the Trump campaign.16 Glenn Simpson, a cofounder of Fusion GPS, hired Nellie Ohr the month before, in April 2016, to work as a subcontractor for Russian contacts, including those purporting to have highly inflammatory but unsubstantiated allegations believed to be detrimental to Trump’s campaign if made public.17

      Nellie Ohr speaks fluent Russian and holds a BA in Russian history and literature from Harvard and a PhD in Russian history from Stanford; she has been a Russia scholar at the Wilson Center and taught at Vassar College.18 Nellie and Bruce Ohr are both listed as working in a June 2010 National Institute of Justice Expert Working Group on International Organized Crime, with Bruce Ohr working as the chief of the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, Criminal Division, US Department of Justice, and Nellie Ohr identified as a researcher with the CIA’s Open Source Works in Washington.19

      The Wilson Center identifies Ohr as an assistant professor at Vassar College, who from August 1, 1997, through October 1, 1997, had a short-term grant with the Kennan Institute to study “collective farmers of Russia’s Western Region after collectivization and under German occupation.”20 A résumé for Nellie Ohr posted on the internet shows she was a former review editor for H-Russia, a member of H-Net Humanities and Social Sciences Online.21 Listed as her major published work to date was a research paper titled “After Collectivization: Social Capital and Local Politics in Rural Western Russia, 1933–1937,” an article that was translated into Russian.

      Nellie Ohr’s maiden name is Hauke; she is the daughter of Dr. Kathleen Armstrong Hauke, a resident of Arlington, Virginia, who was a writer known for popularizing the works of African American journalist Ted Poston, who traveled to the Soviet Union with poet Langston Hughes in 1932.22 A book titled Adventures in Russian Historical Research documents that Ohr was in Moscow doing research, supposedly for her doctoral dissertation, at the Lenin Library in Moscow during 1989.23

      Andrew Weissmann and Sally Yates

      An email obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request shows that on the night of January 30, 2017, former DOJ prosecutor Andrew Weissmann sent an email to former acting attorney general Sally Yates with the subject line, “I am so proud of you.” In the three-sentence body of the email, Weissmann said, “And in awe. Thank you so much. All my deepest respects.”24

      The background of the memo was that President Trump had just fired Yates after an escalating crisis in which Yates, who had served as deputy attorney general under President Obama, had refused to carry out President Trump’s executive order that the political left was interpreting to be a travel ban against Muslims.25 Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch said the email was “an astonishing and disturbing find.” Weissmann had just taken a leave with the DOJ to serve as a top prosecutor on Mueller’s special counsel team. Since 2015, Weissmann had headed DOJ’s criminal fraud division. “Andrew Weissmann, a key prosecutor on Robert Mueller’s team, praised Obama DOJ holdover Sally Yates after she lawlessly thwarted President Trump,” Fitton said. “How much more evidence do we need that the Mueller operation has been irredeemably compromised by anti-Trump partisans?”26

      As a prosecutor, Weissmann has a reputation for being fast and loose with the rules in his zeal to obtain convictions. Sidney Powell—a former US attorney whose 2014 book Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice is a shocking exposé of prosecutorial impropriety that she maintains runs rampant today among Department of Justice prosecutors—warns that Andrew Weissmann, a federal prosecutor who is now part of Mueller’s team, is capable of extorting guilty pleas. Powell points to the example of former Arthur Anderson partner David Duncan,