A top official at the Department of Justice has been demoted over previously undisclosed meetings with the people behind the "Trump dossier," the collection of scurrilous allegations about Donald Trump, Russian prostitutes and more.
Fox News is reporting that Bruce Ohr, an associate attorney general, met with both Christopher Steele and Glenn Simpson, two men behind the dossier. As James Rosen reported in breaking the story, Ohr was demoted and stripped of one of his titles.
Until Wednesday morning, Bruce G. Ohr held two titles at DOJ: associate deputy attorney general, a post that placed him four doors down from his boss, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein; and director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF), a program described by the department as “the centerpiece of the attorney general’s drug strategy.”
DOJ officials have tried to downplay the significance and note that it is unusual for any director to be charged with two key files but Rosen says the demotion is due to what was uncovered by the House Select Committee:
Initially senior department officials could not provide the reason for Ohr’s demotion, but Fox News has learned that evidence collected by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., indicates that Ohr met during the 2016 campaign with Christopher Steele, the former British spy who authored the “dossier.”
Rosen reports that this was not the only unreported meeting that Ohr had regarding the dossier:
Additionally, House 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 compile the dossier with funds supplied by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Ohr has now been ousted from his office on the forth floor of the "Main Justice" building, a location that provided prestige and access.
A subpoena has been issued by the House Select committee to have Ohr appear and his files on this matter delivered to the committee.