Russiagate

Bruce Ohr

Bruce Ohr

The go-between between the FBi (McCabe) and Fusion GPS

Ohr worked for a law firm in San Francisco before becoming a career civil servant at the U.S. Department of Justice, ultimately rising to the rank of associate deputy attorney general. He was an assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York from 1991 to 1999, and was head of the office's Violent Gangs Unit before joining the Justice Department's Washington headquarters as the head of the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the Criminal Division, where Ohr managed teams investigating and prosecuting crime syndicates in Russia and eastern Europe. In 2006, Ohr was one of a number of U.S. government officials who made the decision to revoke the visa of Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch and Vladimir Putin ally.

In 2010, Ohr moved to a new position as counsel for international relations in DoJ's Transnational organized crime and international affairs section. In 2014 he became director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF).

In 2014–2016, Bruce Ohr was involved in a wide–ranging clandestine effort by the U.S. government to recruit Russia's richest men close to Vladimir Putin, such as Oleg Deripaska, as informants for the U.S. government. During this time, Ohr had contacts with the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, whom he had first met in 2007. Steele was also involved in this effort. Steele later authored the Steele dossier in 2016. The New York Times reported that this recruitment effort did not "appear to have scored any successes"; and in Deripaska's case, Deripaska is said to have even notified the Russian authorities about the American effort to recruit him.

Ohr later became associate deputy attorney general, but lost that position in late 2017, although he remained director of OCDETF for a time. Ohr was later demoted by the Department of Justice amid the Senate Intelligence Committee's discovery of his meetings with Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson.