Kremlin asset and pathological liar Donald "Rump" Trump has been turning his vile rhetoric on the Justice Department and the FBI with increased intensity as the Special Counsel's investigation closes in. He's been naming a senior career Justice Department official, Bruce Ohr, whose expertise is Russian organized crime. Rump and his co-conspirators have been sliming Ohr and claiming that he was involved in the Steele dossier's creation aimed at harming Rump's political chances. However, new reporting indicates that his actual work was in "flipping" Russian crime figures, including oligarchs close to Russian thug Vladimir Putin, specifically Oleg Deripaska:
"Between 2014 and 2016, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department unsuccessfully tried to turn Mr. Deripaska into an informant. They signaled that they might provide help with his trouble in getting visas for the United States or even explore other steps to address his legal problems. In exchange, they were hoping for information on Russian organized crime and, later, on possible Russian aid to President Trump’s 2016 campaign, according to current and former officials and associates of Mr. Deripaska.
[snip ]Small wonder that Rump -- and by extension Putin -- wants Ohr gone, in the manner that he had other key Justice and FBI officials fired like Sally Yates, James Comey, Peter Strzok and Andrew McCabe. Each firing should be an obstruction of justice count. It's way beyond Rump displaying consciousness of guilt; it's eliminating the witnesses, and the officials and investigators that are getting the goods on him.
The attempt to flip Mr. Deripaska was part of a broader, clandestine American effort to gauge the possibility of gaining cooperation from roughly a half-dozen of Russia’s richest men, nearly all of whom, like Mr. Deripaska, depend on President Vladimir V. Putin to maintain their wealth, the officials said.
Two of the players in the effort were Bruce G. Ohr, the Justice Department official who has recently become a target of attacks by Mr. Trump, and Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled a dossier of purported links between the Trump campaign and Russia." (our emphasis)
