A Justice Department official who was demoted last month after he was found to have links to the Trump dossier has left a second high-level position at the agency, The Daily Caller has confirmed.
At the beginning of last month, Bruce Ohr held two positions at DOJ: associate deputy attorney general and director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF).
Fox News first reported on Monday that Ohr will no longer lead OCDETF. A Justice Department spokeswoman confirmed Ohr’s separation from that division but did not say whether Ohr resigned or was removed from the position.
Ohr’s job as associate deputy attorney general put him just a few office doors down from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is overseeing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the presidential campaign.
But Ohr was removed from that position early last month after it was revealed that in 2016, he met separately with Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier, and with Glenn Simpson, the founder of the opposition research firm that commissioned the salacious document.
Fox News first reported that Ohr met before the election with Steele, a former MI6 agent. He met just after the election with Simpson, who operates Fusion GPS. Ohr’s wife, a former CIA employee and Russia expert named Nellie Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS to investigate Trump during the campaign.
Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, told the House Intelligence Committee in November that he had met with Ohr.
Fox News has reported that the Justice Department was not aware of Ohr’s links to Fusion GPS and the dossier.
Ohr is slated to meet with the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, Jan. 17. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, agreed last week to make Ohr and several other DOJ and FBI officials available for interviews with the House panel.
