Jeff Carlson has followed up his revelations regarding the leaked (to him)
testimony of former FBI attorney Lisa Page with a similar service regarding the leaked (to him)
testimony of DoJ attorney Bruce Ohr. When I commented on Page's testimony I suggested that, for the most part, there were no major revelations. However, Ohr's testimony is pretty much dynamite. In what follows I'll try to pull out what I regard as the highlights from Ohr's testimony--although Carlson's long and detailed account is well worth careful study. In doing so I will concentrate on what was going on with the FBI, Ohr and the DoJ, and Fusion GPS
before the election, rather than afterward.
As a preliminary, I want to address what is a recurring issue. What exactly was Ohr's role in serving as a conduit of information between Fusion GPS/Orbis (Glenn Simpson/Christopher Steele) and the FBI?
Ohr himself clearly viewed himself as an asset (informant) of some sort for the FBI. For example, he refers to himself as having an FBI "handler" and he acknowledges that he knew he was going against DoJ policy in not informing his superiors of the role he was playing. At the same time, he also knew that the FBI had direct contact with Steele at times, and we know that Steele was an established FBI asset. Two assets, one handling or, at least, servicing the other? Why? To complicate matters, Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion GPS, clearly knew that he was passing material to the FBI through Steele and even, at times, through his good friend Ohr. Yet Simpson didn't want to meet with the FBI and the FBI seemed to prefer using Ohr as a go between with Steele.
Simpson's motives for maintaining a distance from the FBI are clear enough. Simpson would naturally want to avoid any risk of being identified as an FBI asset, if his role should become public (as it has). Moreover, he would also want to maintain control over what material that he held was passed to the FBI. The FBI would also probably prefer not to be linked to Simpson, who was known to be an extreme Democrat partisan as well as unscrupulous in his business. The FBI, on the other hand, would also want to avoid linkage to Steele in this matter, since Steele was a known former MI6 operative linking the Intel Community with political operatives--on both sides of the Atlantic. Ohr, who had legitimate professional reasons to go to FBIHQ, served well as a cutout to avoid accidental sightings of the FBI with Steele or Simpson and to afford the FBI some measure of deniability regarding the sourcing of the materials they were using.
On the other hand, Ohr's explanation for why he claims he didn't inform his superiors--that he wanted the matter to be handled by "career officials" rather than political appointees--doesn't ring true, as the questioning Representatives made clear by pointing out that Ohr, a DoJ official, several times interjected himself into the chain of custody of collected evidence--a no-no. Presumably, from the FBI's and Simpson's point of view, that would be Ohr's personal problem. Interestingly, however, while Ohr claims to have wanted to keep DoJ political appointees in the dark, Lisa Page made it quite clear in her testimony that the FBI had no such qualms:
