The longtime Justice Department official Bruce G Ohr, center, has come under fire from President Trump and his allies. (NYT)
When a lawyer for one of Russia’s most powerful reputed crime bosses arrived at FBI headquarters one day around 2006, he wanted to cut a deal. The Russian, Semion Y. Mogilevich, had been indicted three years earlier by the Justice Department on charges of defrauding a company outside Philadelphia out of $150 million and could not travel for fear of arrest.
As the lawyer made his pitch, a supervising FBI agent and a senior career Justice Department official, Bruce G Ohr, listened intently, according to a former bureau official who described the meeting. The case was significant for U.S. law enforcement. It had made headlines and laid the groundwork for Justice Department efforts to combat Russian organised crime overseas.
Finally, the FBI agent spoke. No deal, he said; Mogilevich must surrender. Ohr said little, but his unwillingness to negotiate was signal enough: The Justice Department would not compromise with the Russian mafia.
“Occasionally you run across people from the Justice Department who have an air of superiority toward agents, and Bruce had none of that,” said Chris Swecker, a former senior FBI official who worked with Ohr. “He was just the opposite. He was well liked at the FBI and fought for their cases.”
In nearly three decades at the Justice Department, Ohr has made a career of supporting and facilitating important cases that targeted Russian organized crime. Now he is a target of President Donald Trump, who has put his security clearance under review and attacked him publicly, and his allies. They have cast Ohr and his wife, Nellie — who worked as a contractor at the same research firm that produced a damaging dossier of information about Trump — as villains, part of a pro-Clinton cabal out to destroy the president.
But Ohr, 56, is far from corrupt, friends and former colleagues said. An experienced law enforcement official, he has a deep understanding of the underworld of Russian organized crime, they said, and raised concerns about at least one oligarch whose name has resurfaced amid the scrutiny of contacts between Trump associates and Russia.
As part of this work, Ohr met a British spy who specialized in Russia, Christopher Steele, and the two men developed a bond based on their shared expertise. Steele went on to investigate ties between Trump and Russia for the same research firm, Fusion GPS, where Nellie Ohr was a contractor.
Those connections have upended Bruce Ohr’s once relatively anonymous life, dragging him into the maelstrom of the Russia investigation. Justice Department officials transferred Ohr, an associate deputy attorney general, to a less powerful post last year after learning about his contacts with Steele and the scope of his wife’s work. If he loses his security clearance, he would probably have to leave federal law enforcement.
“For him to be in the Justice Department, and to be doing what he did, that is a disgrace,” Trump told reporters this month, referring to Ohr.
On Tuesday, Ohr is to appear before a closed hearing of the House Judiciary and House Oversight committees, jointly investigating FBI and Justice Department activities related to the 2016 election. Republicans are likely to ask Ohr why he met with Steele even after the FBI terminated its relationship with Steele for speaking to the news media and who approved the meetings.
Those who know Ohr seem perplexed that the president has singled him out. Co-workers and former associates describe him as a scrupulous government official who cares deeply about the Justice Department.
“He’s a small player in a bigger, broader stage here,” Swecker said. “I feel bad for him. I think he is well intentioned. I view him as someone who would never do anything malicious.” Ohr’s lawyer, Joshua Berman, declined to comment for this article.
A graduate of Harvard Law School, Ohr joined the Justice Department in 1991 from a law firm in San Francisco. As a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, he twice won top awards and rose to be chief of the district’s violent gangs unit.
He had a knack for managing people and pushing cases forward, former associates said, which helped propel him to a job at the Justice Department in Washington in 1999 as the head of the organized crime and racketeering section. He provided the FBI with resources to prosecute cases and navigated relationships with the intelligence community, brokering disputes and earning the respect of the FBI and prosecutors.
As oligarchs and gangs flourished in Eurasia after the fall of the Soviet Union, Ohr, his deputies, the FBI and federal prosecutors tackled Russian crime syndicates, said J. Kenneth Lowrie, a former federal prosecutor who was Ohr’s longtime deputy.
“Until 9/11, organized crime was one of the main priority criminal programs at the Justice Department,” said Lowrie, who retired in 2008. “Russian organized crime was a focus. Bruce knew a lot of the Russia stuff and traveled there.”
Ohr’s section supported the 2000 prosecution of Pavlo Lazarenko, the former prime minister of Ukraine, who was convicted of money laundering, wire fraud and extortion in a case brought by the office of the U.S. attorney in San Francisco at the time, Robert Mueller, who is now the special counsel.
Ohr was a manager, not a litigator, who built bridges with law enforcement agencies around the world, former Justice Department officials said.
In 2006, Ohr was part of a group of government officials who revoked the visa of Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire and aluminum magnate. Officials were concerned that Deripaska might try to come to the United States to launder illicit profits through real estate, a former law enforcement official said.
Deripaska, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin of Russia, has been tied to the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was convicted last week of tax and bank fraud. In 2016, Manafort offered private campaign briefings to Deripaska, raising concerns about the prospect of Russians wielding influence inside the White House. In April, the United States imposed sanctions on Deripaska.
In 2007, Ohr met Steele, who was still with MI-6, the British spy service, according to a former senior U.S. law enforcement official who knows both men. Both governments approved their contacts, the former official said.
Ohr moved on to other senior jobs, starting in 2010 as counsel for international relations in the Justice Department’s transnational organized crime and international affairs section, where he bolstered partnerships with foreign law enforcement agencies. In 2014, he became the director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces, distributing grant money to bolster prosecutorial work.
He stayed in touch with Steele, meeting him in Rome in 2014 and in Washington in 2015.
For the FBI, their relationship would come in handy. A longtime informant who provided valuable tips on corruption, Steele violated his confidentiality agreement with the FBI when he disclosed to a reporter in the months before the 2016 election that he had been working with the bureau. He had expressed frustration that his information about Trump, gathered for Fusion GPS, the research firm that hired him on behalf of Democrats to research the candidate, had gone seemingly nowhere in the FBI.
In early November 2016, the agent handling Steele told him not to obtain intelligence “on behalf of the FBI.”
That did not stop FBI agents from collecting coveted information from Steele. While the FBI could no longer consider him a confidential informant, former officials said, agents eager to assess the dossier as part of their counterintelligence investigation into links between Trump associates and Russia’s election interference could still document what he was telling a third party — Ohr.
Ohr met with Steele almost a dozen times beginning in late 2016 through May 2017, according to congressional officials. FBI agents interviewed Ohr after the meetings and documented the information.
Republicans have seized on the meetings. Sen. Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked the Justice Department to declassify the FBI’s reports on them. “It seems like he is a key player,” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, a staunch supporter of the president, told Fox News this month.
But the arrangement was not unusual, former law enforcement officials said. Senior FBI officials were aware of the Steele meetings and those involved followed internal guidelines, a former official said.
Ohr’s contacts with Steele were one small part of a broader effort to determine whether the allegations in the dossier were true, a former official said. The FBI also did not have all the reports that Steele had produced and agents were keen to get them.
Conservatives have also targeted Nellie Ohr, whose contract work at Fusion GPS involved monitoring Russian news media and compiling connections between Trump and Russia from public documents. She did not work on the dossier, according to a person familiar with her work.
Bruce Ohr still has a job at the Justice Department, though he is functionally no longer a manager. It is unclear how long that will last. Trump has called for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to fire Ohr.
“It seems that Bruce had two sins: He met with Chris Steele and his wife worked for Fusion GPS. None of that seems wrong to me,” Lowrie said. “Bruce is a straight arrow. He was totally nonpartisan, as we all were expected” to be.