Nellie Ohr is an ex-CIA contractor.
She wrote her first
Millian report in April 2016, the month before Fusion GPS hired former
British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to put his imprimatur as
a supposed former “spy” and "Russian insider" on the dossier.
"This
report was prepared just ten days after Fusion GPS was retained by
[Clinton campaign law firm] Perkins Coie to conduct opposition research
on Trump,” the Durham Report states, "and prior to Steele being retained
by Fusion GPS."
Durham suggests Nellie
Ohr planted the seeds of sourcing for the most explosive allegations
leveled by the dossier against Trump, including the oft-cited notion
that he and his campaign were engaged in a “well-developed conspiracy of
cooperation” with the Kremlin. The dossier attributed this, falsely, to
Millian. Durham found that the Belarusian-American realtor was never a
source for the dossier and was simply invented as one, along with the
allegations attributed to him.
In fact, Durham says that Millian initially
wasn’t even on the radar of Steele and his dossier “collector" Igor
Danchenko, a former Brookings Institution analyst who's admitted much of
the information he provided Steele was alcohol-lubricated gossip.
Millian was called to their attention by Nellie Ohr, who the prosecutor
said “implicated" Millian through her own reports. Durham suggests
Steele and Danchenko merely followed her leads.
Meanwhile, the prosecutor added, Bruce Ohr,
an anti-Trump Democrat, pushed his wife’s reports that cited Millian —
12 in all — onto the Crossfire Hurricane team at FBI headquarters that
was investigating Trump and his campaign for possible espionage. Agents
used her reports as a source of corroboration for the Steele reports
they received in the summer and fall of 2016, even though it was
circular reporting. ...
In other words, Steele was not the catalyst
behind the dossier’s central claims. Rather, it was Clinton's contractor
Fusion GPS -- but more specifically, the wife of a senior DOJ official
who worked for Fusion. So the FBI wasn’t really investigating "Crown
reporting,” as officials referred to Steele’s dossier, implying it was
British intelligence. More accurately, it was investigating information
from inside its own department that was laundered through Steele and his
dossier.
The Durham report shows that the FBI had the dossier reports in July 2016, two months before the time in September insisted upon by the FBI.
The Ohrs are ground zero for the Trump-Russia-collusion disinformation operation.
More.
