2015 Employment of Nellie Ohr by Fusion GPS Raises New Questions

The Epoch Times ^ | September 2, 2018 | Jeff Carlson

[rlmorel]

One of the bombshell admissions from the closed-door testimony of DOJ official Bruce Ohr was that his wife, Nellie Ohr, was already working for opposition research firm Fusion GPS in late 2015.

Previously, it had been reported that Nellie Ohr was hired to find dirt on then-candidate Donald Trump in the spring of 2016.

“Ohr testified that Fusion approached his wife for a job and that she began working for the research firm in late 2015,” the Daily Caller reported.

[rlmorel]

Nellie Ohr was working for Fusion GPS as early as November 2015, as was revealed in sworn testimony behind closed doors this past week.

As Dan Bongino said on his show today (click here to read his show notes and listen to his excellent podcast) "Why is this important?"

It is important because in November 2015, the NSA database of FISA information began to experience a threefold increase over time in data queries, which Admiral Michael Rogers was made aware of, kicking off this whole thing. Below is an excellent timeline from an excellent article by Jeff Carlson (the man is a journalistic stud of the highest order) which highlights the role of the unsung hero in all of this, the man that may ultimately be responsible for bringing this entire shameful affair: Admiral Michael Rogers. (Article: The Uncovering – Mike Rogers’ Investigation, Section 702 FISA Abuse & the FBI)

• November 2015-April 2016 – The FBI and DOJ’s National Security Division (NSD) uses private contractors to access raw FISA information using “To” and “From” FISA-702(16) & “About” FISA-702(17) queries.
• March 2016 – NSA Director Rogers becomes aware of improper access to raw FISA data.
• April 2016 – Rogers orders the NSA compliance officer to run a full audit on 702 NSA compliance.
• April 18 2016 – Rogers shuts down FBI/NSD contractor access to the FISA Search System.
• September 26 2016 – DOJ’s NSD Head John Carlin files the Government’s proposed 2016 Section 702 certifications. Carlin has been aware of Rogers’ compliance review.
• September 27 2016 – Carlin announces he is resigning. Mary McCord will later assume his position.
• October 15, 2016 – Carlin formally leaves the NSD.
• Mid-October 2016 – DNI Clapper submits a recommendation to the White House that Director Rogers be removed from the NSA.
• October 20 2016 – Rogers is briefed by the NSA compliance officer on the Section 702 NSA compliance audit and “About” query violations.
• October 21 2016 – Rogers shuts down all “About Query” activity. Rogers reports the activity to DOJ and prepares to go before the FISA Court.
• October 21 2016 – DOJ & FBI seek and receive a Title I FISA probable cause order authorizing electronic surveillance on Carter Page from the FISC. At this point, the FISA Court is unaware of the Section 702 violations.
• October 24 2016 – Rogers verbally informs the FISA Court of Section 702(17) violations.
• October 26 2016 – Rogers formally informs the FISA Court of 702(17) violations in writing.
• November 17 2016 (morning) – Rogers travels to meet President-Elect Trump and his Transition Team in Trump Tower. Rogers does not inform DNI James Clapper.
• November 17 2016 (evening) – Trump Transition Team announces they are moving all transition activity to Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey.

In this graphic I cobbled together below from the unsealed FISA Court document Jeff Carlson references in his article which outlines the official recognition of the illegal abuse of the NSA FISA database. When the irregularity became known, the FISA court was notified as required by law of it. Of all the laws, regulations, and limitations that should have been observed, Admiral Rogers stands out as the lone entity who did his job in this scandalous mess. James Clapper recognized just how much of a threat Admiral Rogers posed in his diligent and patriotic efforts to get to the bottom of the abuse, and Clapper's recommendation to fire Admiral Rogers when he informed the incoming Trump administration on November 17, 2016 further illustrates that he knew the trouble it was going to cause all of them in the future...as it has.

Why does this relate to Nellie Ohr? She was working for Fusion GPS in November 2015 according to the sworn testimony, far earlier than was known before the testimony. She was a Russian expert, and spoke Russian fluently. Here is the main question: Was Nellie Ohr, wife of Bruce Ohr (The #4 man at the Department of Justice) and also working for Fusion GPS also working as an FBI contractor with access to the database at the time when the large increase in queries began to occur...in November 2015 when she began her employment with Fusion GPS?

This may turn out to be the key to the entire thing.

• This entire spectacle was a setup from the get-go. As Dan Bongino postulated, Nellie Ohr may have been one of those external contractors with access to the NSA FISA database, and had been mining data illegally out of it. When Admiral Rogers shut down all external contractor access when he became aware of the 'irregularities', Nellie Ohr's "customers" at the DOJ/FBI lost their source of information. They had to go to plan B, which was to get a FISA warrant which would get the illegal data stream going again, and they did that by trying to frame Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, the framing process which began a short time after Donald Trump announced the composition of his Foreign policy team in March 2016 that included those two men.

• First they pushed out information to George Papadopoulos about dirt on Hillary Clinton that the Russians supposedly had, and Alexander Downer (the Australian ambassador who has ties to Western intelligence in the UK) pulled it out, and this was used as a pretext to pin a FISA warrant on Papadopoulos.

• Then they tried another plan to buttress a FISA warrant by sending the female Fusion GPS Russian lawyer, the former Russian intelligence agent, and a translator (who used to do work for Hillary Clinton at the State Department) over to Trump Towers for the now infamous meeting. There is speculation that this may have been a "twofer" for Fusion GPS: discuss repealing the Maginsky Act with a Presidential candidate on one hand, and implant "Russian dirt" into the Trump campaign and justify the FISA warrant on the other hand.

• Their problem was, the Trump campaign didn't bite and cut the meeting short.

• Then their next plan was for Stefan Halper (a CIA asset being used by the FBI in their idiotic "Crossfire Hurricane" to get intelligence) to get Papadopoulos over in the UK and pull some incriminating statement out of him about Clinton's emails, but again, Papadopoulos refused to take the bait.

• If Admiral Michael Rogers hadn't pulled the plug on the unauthorized and illegal access to the NSA database, perhaps none of the other things, the framing of the Trump campaign, the bogus FISA requests, the stupid "Crossfire Hurricane" investigation, all that, may have never happened. But because Admiral Rogers DID pull the plug...Nellie Ohr may have been cut off from her information stream she was using, and for want of a nail, a shoe was lost, and all that followed.

[Paladin2]

I think Weasel Muller’s hiring of Andrew Weissmann is a bigger issue.

[Bullish]

Smelly hOhr is going to be the lynchpin that ends up hanging them all.

This conspiracy got way too big for them to keep hidden. Consequences are to be expected. That’s why the dems are screaming like stuck pigs and overplaying every hand.

They’re all about to be hoisted on their own petard.

[rlmorel]

Well, yeah, that is too. The thing is, with the scope of this scandal, any single one of them should be enough to blow this entire thing sky high.

Muller is so completely and deeply conflicted by close relationships with people all up and down this scandal...that ALONE is worthy.

Andrew Weissman, John Carlin, etc. the list is huge.

[rlmorel]

Yep, I too have come to see the roles of Bruce and Nellie Ohr in this as the thing that will finally bring it all crashing down around them.

[Bullish]

It’s unfathomable how stupid and careless they all were under the Obama admin. I believe that’s only because “the won” and the planet of the apes lady were calling all the shots.

[Bullish]

It’s unfathomable how stupid and careless they all were under the Obama admin.

I believe that’s only because “the won” and the planet of the apes lady were calling all the shots.

[ALX]

If this insurance policy were actually true, it also could include tactics memorialized in a memo, written in 2009 by a Democratic strategist working at the time for the liberal smear group Media Matters.

It described how to fight a “well funded, presidential-style campaign to discredit and embarrass” targets. Private eyes would probe into their personal lives, courts would be used for lawsuits. “Massive demonstrations” would be organized, Michael Moore would make a negative documentary and “a team of trackers” would stake out targets at events. “Opposition research” would be collected.

The targets would be attacked on social media, yard signs posted in their neighborhoods, and a “mole” placed inside their organization.
If there really were an insurance policy against Trump, it might include having ex-intel officials getting hired at national news outlets where they’d monitor and influence news organizations, and be invited to give daily spin on controversies surrounding their own actions. Figures such as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Comey aide Josh Campbell and others could get hired by CNN; former CIA Director John Brennan and ex-Mueller/Comey aide Chuck Rosenberg could get hired by NBC and MSNBC.

But all that would never really happen. Or if it did, it’s downright silly to think of it as part of an organized insurance policy. http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/401116-what-would-the-intelligence-communitys-insurance-policy-against-trump

[pepsionice]

This strategy written up in 2009....was fairly well designed and I’d say in 99.9-percent of cases, it would work.

But then, you have this Trump guy. And I’d suggest that he’s designed in some way to take the ‘curtain’ down and expose the strategy in its entire nature. In six years, the trust factor with the Democratic Party could be near zero. Nellie Ohr? I think she probably needs two years in prison to sort through her lifestyle.

[Ann Archy]

You ALL need to listen to Dan Bonginos podcast!!

[Ann Archy]

You ALL need to listen to Dan Bonginos podcast!!

[Ann Archy]

You ALL need to listen to Dan Bonginos podcast!!

[Ann Archy]

AMEN!!! WEISMANN SHOULD BE IN PRISON!!!

[ReaganGeneration2]

The problem: the FISA process apparently cannot work in the hands of any govt people, as long as we respect the 4th Amendment. So, the data collections will need to be shut down, and that increases the risks to national security.

Notice that it’s taken 2-3 years, and still no one has been held to account for this. The process does not function.

[mewzilla]

I wonder how long surveillance of Trump really goes back...

[rlmorel]

I feel certain, looking at the information in this new context, that the surveillance of Trump goes back to November 2015, when the big jump in NSA database queries began, coincidentally when Nellie Ohr began working for Fusion GPS.

[bert]

Unmentioned in all this is what surveilance was carried out on the other Republican candidates?

Surely Jeb Bush was surveiled as the leading candidate in the early days of the campaign. Trump surveilance is but the observable part of the survelience ice berg

[rlmorel]

I know this post is long, but as a form of contrition, even if only read by very few who have taken the time to read this thread, I feel compelled to do so.

I have made this public mea culpa more than a few times, but this is possibly why this entire wholesale violation of the surveillance system makes me literally steaming mad, more than usual. I fully confess that I DO feel violated and taken advantage of by this entire scandal.

When I was listening to this new information on the Dan Bongino show yesterday (See the link at the start of the thread if you are interested) I began to feel anger leaking out of my seams.

I was someone who took the stance after 9/11 that we were at war. And we were.

And I have always felt (and still do) that in a time of war, certain liberties may have to be curtailed. People may disagree with that, but it is undeniable that we do curtail liberties in war. We don’t allow certain information to be disseminated or published in papers for obvious reasons. So I don’t think that is a very unorthodox point of view, even as it is not uniformly accepted. But that is how I roll.

With the massive degree of signal intelligence (voice, email, text, etc) that has been taking place, capturing and storing in databases of the legal communications of normal, non-lawbreaking citizens, the system has been ripe for abuse, and even before it began, voice was being given to concerns.

Our government, who I and many others stupidly trusted, put in place mechanisms to ostensibly protect our rights, yet allow the government to be able to observe and analyze communications in an ongoing attempt to ward off another attack like the one on 9/11.

When they set this massive system up, they put in place all kinds of rules, regulations, and guidelines to protect our privacy as citizens.

That’s nice, as far as it goes. Anyone who works with computers and databases that are accessed understands there are weak points inherent in the technology itself and the official processes and procedures to ensure proper and legal access to data in databases and to minimize the impact to our privacy under law as US citizens. We know it isn’t perfect.

But as the now oft quoted Benjamin Franklin statement “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” implies, I see now I should have been willing to accept a greater risk of another 9/11 rather than to put that power of surveillance into the hands of government bureaucrats.

We have the best Constitution in the world. If observed and backed by law, it protects us to a very high degree, it is that well designed.

But as Alexandr Solzhenitsyn pointed out from the perspective of someone in the Gulag, the Soviet Union also had a wonderfully constructed Constitution that sounded perfect, but was twisted by law and the Soviet Government to be used as a weapon against its citizens because it was so deliberately twisted and misused that it gave Constitutional cover to those abusing it to imprison people.

Our Constitution is great. But if it is routinely ignored (as it is) it begins to be worth less than the parchment it was written on.

And we can see that in this case, all those byzantine, comprehensive, well thought out, and legal guidelines to protect us from government bureaucrats who could legally access up to five years of rich data on each and every one of us...well, they simply stepped over them and ignored them to spy on an opposition party in a presidential campaign.

If they did that (and I am 100% certain they did) it takes no stretch of the imagination to see how contemptuously they would brush away those “protections” if they chose to squash us like bugs. And likely do.

So I was wrong to accept it. I was foolish, and had too much faith in our Constitution which our forefathers designed to be administered by moral people, with inherent ways to take into account that corrupt, greedy, vindictive, and evil people are found everywhere (especially in government) and protect us from them. I should have been more willing to risk another attack like 9/11, but I thought the risk of becoming a Surveillance State was worth it.

I was wrong, damned wrong. And it makes me angry to have to accept it.

[Paladin2]

"I know this post is long"

Correct, but OK.

[rlmorel]

You are completely on target on your post...as we now know, Andrew Weissman...THE ANDREW WIESSMAN WHO IS THE ATTACK DOG ON MUELLER’S TEAM...was being kept in the loop the entire time by Bruce Ohr.

And Weissman is now in a position to investigate his own malfeasance.

Unbelievable.