In an effort to get ahead of the release of Bruce Ohr’s private congressional testimony—which undoubtedly will include more stunning details about the depth of his relationship with a paid political operative from another country—and mitigate the damage from Ohr’s recently released emails, the Times is already working to cover the Justice Department official’s tracks.
The article, “Agents Tried to Flip Russian Oligarchs. The Fallout Spread to Trump,” is an almost laughable attempt to justify Ohr’s decade-long collaboration with Christopher Steele, the former British spy and author of the infamous dossier that alleged the Putin regime was working with the Trump campaign in 2016.
Reporters Kenneth Vogel and Matthew Rosenberg expose a super-secret government plan to persuade six Russian billionaires, including Oleg Deripaska, to become FBI assets. (Deripaska has figured into Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecution of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager.) One of the Justice Department officials in on the alleged oligarch-flipping plan was Bruce Ohr.
The reporters cite unnamed former and current Justice Department officials who expressed concern that President Trump and his supporters would “use the program’s secrecy as a screen with which they could cherry-pick facts and present them, sheared of context, to undermine the special counsel’s investigation.” But a closer look at what this article says—and more importantly, what it doesn’t say—makes it clear that Vogel and Rosenberg are running cover for Ohr, even portraying him as a victim of unfair attacks by the president.
The article reveals that Ohr’s relationship with Steele, a one-time FBI source, dates to 2007. The two started discussing plans to “cultivate” Deripaska in 2014, long after Steele left the British government and started his own consulting business. But it probably wasn’t the case that these two former crime-fighting colleagues hatched a genius plan to convince one of the richest men in the world to turn on a vengeful Russian authoritarian president. It’s more likely that Steele, who now claims Deripaska as a client, was attempting to get U.S. officials to reinstate the Russian’s visa, which was revoked in 2006. (A story, coincidentally, that Fusion GPS principal Glenn Simpson broke in 2007 while he was a reporter with the Wall Street Journal. In his Senate testimony last year, Simpson said his article caused Deripaska “a lot of embarrassment and trouble with his business and led to [Deripaska] hiring a lobbyist and trying to get involved with getting a visa to the U.S.”)
N.Y. Times Throws Up a Smokescreen for Bruce Ohr
The article, “Agents Tried to Flip Russian Oligarchs. The Fallout Spread to Trump,” is an almost laughable attempt to justify Ohr’s decade-long collaboration with Christopher Steele, the former British spy and author of the infamous dossier that alleged the Putin regime was working with the Trump campaign in 2016.
Reporters Kenneth Vogel and Matthew Rosenberg expose a super-secret government plan to persuade six Russian billionaires, including Oleg Deripaska, to become FBI assets. (Deripaska has figured into Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecution of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager.) One of the Justice Department officials in on the alleged oligarch-flipping plan was Bruce Ohr.
The reporters cite unnamed former and current Justice Department officials who expressed concern that President Trump and his supporters would “use the program’s secrecy as a screen with which they could cherry-pick facts and present them, sheared of context, to undermine the special counsel’s investigation.” But a closer look at what this article says—and more importantly, what it doesn’t say—makes it clear that Vogel and Rosenberg are running cover for Ohr, even portraying him as a victim of unfair attacks by the president.
The article reveals that Ohr’s relationship with Steele, a one-time FBI source, dates to 2007. The two started discussing plans to “cultivate” Deripaska in 2014, long after Steele left the British government and started his own consulting business. But it probably wasn’t the case that these two former crime-fighting colleagues hatched a genius plan to convince one of the richest men in the world to turn on a vengeful Russian authoritarian president. It’s more likely that Steele, who now claims Deripaska as a client, was attempting to get U.S. officials to reinstate the Russian’s visa, which was revoked in 2006. (A story, coincidentally, that Fusion GPS principal Glenn Simpson broke in 2007 while he was a reporter with the Wall Street Journal. In his Senate testimony last year, Simpson said his article caused Deripaska “a lot of embarrassment and trouble with his business and led to [Deripaska] hiring a lobbyist and trying to get involved with getting a visa to the U.S.”)
N.Y. Times Throws Up a Smokescreen for Bruce Ohr