Durham Finds the Importance of Nellie Ohr
Paul Sperry at RealClearPolitics posted an article yesterday citing one part of the Durham report that deserves a little CTH attention.
I hope you will forgive my indulgent snickers, as the graphic you see below was created by me in early 2018, a full five years before the release of this Durham report. I even referred to the Steele Dossier as the Nellie Ohr Dossier. lol
As noted by Sperry, “According to the 306-page report, former Justice Department prosecutor Bruce Ohr’s wife Nellie Ohr first plowed the ground for the dossier with a series of research reports she wrote for Fusion GPS, the D.C.-based opposition research firm the Clinton campaign commissioned to dig up dirt on Trump and Russia.”
[…] Durham suggests Nellie Ohr planted the seeds of sourcing for the most explosive allegations leveled by the dossier against Trump, including the oft-cited notion that he and his campaign were engaged in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” with the Kremlin. The dossier attributed this, falsely, to Millian. Durham found that the Belarusian-American realtor was never a source for the dossier and was simply invented as one, along with the allegations attributed to him.
In fact, Durham says that Millian initially wasn’t even on the radar of Steele and his dossier “collector” Igor Danchenko, a former Brookings Institution analyst who’s admitted much of the information he provided Steele was alcohol-lubricated gossip. Millian was called to their attention by Nellie Ohr, who the prosecutor said “implicated” Millian through her own reports. Durham suggests Steele and Danchenko merely followed her leads.
[…] Bruce Ohr, an anti-Trump Democrat, pushed his wife’s reports that cited Millian — 12 in all — onto the Crossfire Hurricane team at FBI headquarters that was investigating Trump and his campaign for possible espionage. Agents used her reports as a source of corroboration for the Steele reports they received in the summer and fall of 2016, even though it was circular reporting.
“The reports prepared by Ohr and others at Fusion GPS were ultimately provided to Crossfire Hurricane investigators by Ohr’s husband, Bruce Ohr,” according to the Durham Report.
Durham notes that Danchenko was tracking leads on Millian from Nellie Ohr within “approximately one week” of Fusion GPS retaining Steele to compile the dossier. He concludes that this “strongly supports the inference that Fusion GPS directed Steele to pursue Millian.”
In other words, Steele was not the catalyst behind the dossier’s central claims. Rather, it was Clinton’s contractor Fusion GPS — but more specifically, the wife of a senior DOJ official who worked for Fusion. So the FBI wasn’t really investigating “Crown reporting,” as officials referred to Steele’s dossier, implying it was British intelligence. More accurately, it was investigating information from inside its own department that was laundered through Steele and his dossier. (read more)
Smart fella that John Durham.
Nellie Ohr – a former CIA open-source expert on all things Russia; a woman who used HAM radios for communication; a woman who approached Fusion GPS owner Glenn Simpson for a job in December 2015; she was the impetus for the information that ended up in the Chris Steele Dossier.
Gee, go figure.
Darned Suspicious Cats, always being, well, suspicious…
I wonder if Durham tracked down the Michael Cohen art dealer in New York (
), the guy that went to Prague on business.
Live your best life and laugh more than a little.
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