As discovered in documents procured by The Daily Caller News Foundation, Bruce Ohr, the former associate deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice, did not reveal that Fusion GPS, which compiled opposition research on Donald Trump that Ohr brought to the FBI, was paying his wife Nellie. Ohr did not get a conflict of interest waiver from his superiors at the Justice Department.
Fusion GPS had been hired by the Democratic National Committee to collate information damaging to Trump and to circulate it. As The Daily Caller writes of the Fusion GPS dossier:
The DOJ used it to obtain a warrant to wiretap a Trump adviser, but didn’t disclose to the judge that the DNC and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign had funded the research and that Ohr had a financial relationship with the firm that performed it — which could be, it turns out, because Ohr doesn’t appear to have told his supervisors.
After the connection between Ohr’s wife and Fusion GPS had been revealed and Fusion founder Glenn Simpson admitted his connection with Ohr, Ohr was demoted from his post in December, leaving him as director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces, but he was stripped of that post in January.
Ohr mentioned on ethics forms dealing with the years 2014-15 that Nellie was an “independent contractor” earning consulting fees; for 2016 he only said a “cyberthreat analyst” was paying her a salary.
The Daily Caller explains what was required on the ethics forms: “The instructions require officials to “Provide the name of your spouse’s employer. In addition, if your spouse’s employer is a privately held business, provide the employer’s line of business.”
Ohr could be sentenced to jail for willfully falsifying government ethics forms.
Paul Kamenar, a Washington, D.C., public policy lawyer, told The Daily Caller: “The law provides that whoever ‘knowingly and willfully’ fails to file information required to be filed on this report faces civil penalties up to $50,000 and possible criminal penalties up to one year in prison under the disclosure law and possibly up to five years in prison under 18 USC 1001. Since he lists her income type as ‘salary’ as opposed to line 1 where he describes her other income as ‘consulting fees’ as an ‘independent contractor’ it’s clear that she was employed by a company that should have been identified by name.”