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    Categories: Legal News

DOJ Official Demoted for Supporting Anti-Trump Dossier

Summary: A Justice Department official has been demoted from his position as assistant deputy attorney general for meeting with anti-Trump supporters.

A senior Justice Department official has been demoted for his relationship with an opposing research firm of Donald Trump. In an exclusive report from Fox News, they stated that Bruce G. Ohr had two titles at the Justice Department until Wednesday.

Ohr was the associate deputy attorney general and director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF). The associate deputy attorney general position put him four doors down from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The OCDETF program is described as the “centerpiece of the attorney general’s drug strategy.”

He will be keeping his title as director of the OCDETF but no longer holds the position that allows him to have his office on the fourth floor of the “Main Justice.” Senior department officials claimed to have no explanation for his demotion but some investigating by Fox News of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence evidence shows that Ohr met with Christopher Steele, a former British spy who authored the “dossier” during the 2016 presidential campaign.

A Justice Department official finally said, “It is unusual for anyone to wear two hats as he has done recently. This person is going to go back to a single focus – director of our organized crime and drug enforcement unit. As you know, combating transnational criminal organizations and drug trafficking is a top priority for the attorney general.”

The House investigation into Ohr also determined that he met soon after the election with Glenn Simpson, founder of Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm hired by Steele to put together the report, paid for by funds from the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.  When Ohr met with Simpson, the report was already in the hands of the FBI.

By the time the report was compiled, Carter Page, an adviser to the Trump campaign, had already been under surveillance for two months. Former FBI Director James Comey testified that the dossier was filled with “salacious and unverified” allegations of Trump and his associates. The Nunes panel has been investigating whether the DOJ under the direction of then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, used these allegations to place Page under a foreign surveillance warrant.

The Nunes panel claims the FBI and Justice Department have been “stonewalling” them in their efforts to obtain documents and witnesses. Both agencies assert that they are cooperating with the investigation by providing several hundred pages of classified documents involving the dossier and allowing Peter Strzok, a high-ranking FBI official, to be available for questioning. Strzok was disciplined in July for sending anti-Trump texts to a colleague. He also played a large role in making the decision on the investigation into Clinton’s private server use. Strzok was removed from the staff of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and demoted to a position in the FBI’s human resources division.

Apparently, Simpson and Ohr discussed the anti-Trump dossier, the Russia investigation and what Simpson referred to as the upsetting development of Trump winning when they met around Thanksgiving last year over coffee. The two were put in touch by Steele, a former FBI informant, who has been a contact of Ohr’s since 2006.

Do you think everyone would be surprised by the number of people serving both sides? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

To learn more about the email server investigation with Clinton, read these articles:

Photo: globalinitiative.net

Amanda Griffin: