First came the text messages between FBI lovebirds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, which gave us a painful glimpse at potential political bias inside America’s most famous crime-fighting bureau.
Now, a series of “Hi Honey” emails from Nellie Ohr to her high-ranking federal prosecutor-husband and his colleagues raise the prospect that Hillary Clinton-funded opposition research was being funneled into the Justice Department during the 2016 election through a back-door marital channel. It's a tale that raises questions of both conflict of interest and possible false testimony.
Ohr has admitted to Congress that, during the 2016 presidential election, she worked for Fusion GPS — the firm hired by Clinton and the Democratic National Committee to perform political opposition research — on a project specifically trying to connect Donald Trump and his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, to Russian organized crime.
Now, 339 pages of emails, from her private account to Department of Justice (DOJ) email accounts, have been released under a Freedom of Information Act request by the conservative legal group Judicial Watch.
They clearly show that Ohr sent reams of open-source intelligence to her husband, Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, and on some occasions to at least three DOJ prosecutors: Lisa Holtyn, Ivana Nizich and Joseph Wheatley.
The contents tracked corruption developments in Russia and Ukraine, including intelligence affecting Russian figures she told Congress she had tried to connect to Trump or Manafort.
“Hi Honey, if you ever get a moment you might find the penultimate article interesting — especially the summary in the final paragraph,” Nellie Ohr emailed her husband on July 6, 2016, in one typical communication. The article and paragraph she flagged suggested that Trump was a Putin stooge: “If Putin wanted to concoct the ideal candidate to service his purposes, his laboratory creation would look like Donald Trump.” Nellie Ohr bolded that key sentence for apparent emphasis.
Such overt political content flowing into the email accounts of a DOJ charged with the nonpartisan mission of prosecuting crimes is jarring enough. It raises additional questions about potential conflicts of interest when it is being injected by a spouse working as a Democratic contractor trying to defeat Trump, and she is forwarding her own research to his department and co-workers.
For instance, the same July 6, 2016, email that forwarded the anti-Trump screed also included research on an oligarch named Rinat Akhmetov, a Ukrainian that Nellie Ohr told Congress she was researching for Fusion for possible ties to Trump.
“Rinat Akhmetov is someone who also was associated with Manafort. Now, he’s Ukrainian, and right now, I can't remember whether people explicitly, you know, pointed to particular organized crime activity that he’s suspected of,” she testified.
Other emails that Nellie Ohr forwarded to her husband and the other DOJ officials contained links to open-source information, such as news articles and academic research, that would later surface as evidence of alleged collusion between Trump and Russia. They included that:
then-Russian ambassador to Washington Sergey Kislyak attended an April 2016 foreign policy speech by Trump. Former Attorney General Jeff Session eventually was forced to recuse himself from the Russia investigation as attorney general in part because he met Kislyak at that speech;
then-Trump campaign adviser Carter Page gave a July 2016 speech in Moscow. Nellie Ohr bolded a passage in the article noting Page’s company “continues to work with Russian investments” and included someone tied to the Russian energy giant GazProm….
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