Republicans grill government lawyer whom Trump has attacked via tweets
WASHINGTON — A longtime government lawyer who has become a central figure in President DonaldTrump’s efforts to undermine the Russia investigation underwent more than seven hours of questioning by Republicans on Tuesday onCapitol Hill.
BruceOhr was grilled behind closed doors by two GOP-led House committees that are looking into decisions made by the Justice Department ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
The lawmakers are interested in Mr. Ohr — he has also been the subject of Mr. Trump’s angry tweets — because of his relationship with Christopher Steele, the former British spy whose opposition research on Mr. Trump’s Russia ties was compiled into a dossier and turned over to the FBI before the presidential election.
Mr. Trump and his allies question the origins of the FBI’s investigation into potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign, which was taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller in May 2017. Mr. Trump and some House Republicans say the dossier created a politically tainted pretext for the investigation, even though the probe began weeks before the bureau received the documents.
Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, one of the Republicans who attended Tuesday’s interview, said that, so far, Mr. Ohr’s interview and others have shown an “excessive reliance” on the dossier.
“And if the dossier truly is the rotten foundation upon which the Mueller church is built, I think that’s an important revelation,” Mr. Gaetz said.
Democrats say the entire GOP investigation is an attempt to undermine Mr. Mueller. They have criticized the Republicans’ focus on Mr. Ohr as overblown and misleading.
A Harvard-educated lawyer who was a federal prosecutor in Manhattan in the 1990s, Mr. Ohr at the time of the presidential election was a high-ranking official in the deputy attorney general’s office. But it’s Mr. Ohr’s relationship with Mr. Steele that has given fodder to Republican critics in Congress.
The two had met a decade earlier, bonding over a mutual interest in Russian organizedcrime.
Though Mr. Ohr did not handle national security or counterintelligence work in the deputy attorney general’s office, he nonetheless became a point of contact for Mr. Steele to share information with in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Ohr passed along tidbits he learned to the FBI, which was conducting its own investigation.
Glenn Simpson, cofounder of Fusion GPS, the political research firm that was paid by Democrats and hired Mr. Steele for the investigation, told House lawmakers in a meeting last year that he also met with Mr. Ohr at Mr. Steele’s behest amid what he said was anxiety that federal investigators were not taking seriously enough the threat of Russian election interference and the information Mr.Steele had accumulated.
Aside from their own personal connection, Mr. Ohr’s wife, Nellie, was working at Fusion GPS — a connection Mr. Trump and his allies have repeatedly seized upon as they allege anti-Trump bias in the department.