Thread: Miles Beyond Sketchy-Wife of Demoted DOJ Official Worked For Fusion GPS on Russian

Miles Beyond Sketchy – Wife of Demoted DOJ Official Worked For Fusion GPS on Russian Dossier Against Trump….



Posted on December 11, 2017 by sundance

Things are beyond brutally obvious in this entire ‘muh Russian conspiracy’ narrative. Last week it was revealed DOJ Assoc. Deputy Attorney General Bruce G Ohr was demoted because he had working relationships with dossier author Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS, and did not reveal his October 2016 contacts with current officials.


Today, the ongoing saga gets more sketchy as it is revealed Bruce G Ohr’s wife, Nellie H. Ohr, actually worked for Fusion GPS and likely helped guide/script the Russian Dossier.





JAMES ROSEN – A senior Justice Department official demoted last week for concealing his meetings with the men behind the anti-Trump “dossier” had even closer ties to Fusion GPS, the firm responsible for the incendiary document, than have been disclosed, Fox News has confirmed: The official’s wife worked for Fusion GPS during the 2016 election.


Contacted by Fox News, investigators for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) confirmed that Nellie H. Ohr, wife of the demoted official, Bruce G. Ohr, worked for the opposition research firm last year. The precise nature of Mrs. Ohr’s duties – including whether she worked on the dossier – remains unclear but a review of her published works available online reveals Mrs. Ohr has written extensively on Russia-related subjects. HPSCI staff confirmed to Fox News that she was paid by Fusion GPS through the summer and fall of 2016.


Fusion GPS has attracted scrutiny because Republican lawmakers have spent the better part of this year investigating whether the dossier, which was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, served as the basis for the Justice Department and the FBI to obtain FISA surveillance last year on a Trump campaign adviser named Carter Page.


“The House Intelligence Committee,” Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., told Fox News in a statement on Monday, “is looking into all facets of the connections between the Department of Justice and Fusion GPS, including Mr. Ohr.”


Until Dec. 6, when Fox News began making inquiries about him, Bruce Ohr held two titles at DOJ. He was, and remains, director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force; but his other job was far more senior. Mr. Ohr held the rank of associate deputy attorney general, a post that gave him an office four doors down from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.


The day before Fox News reported that Mr. Ohr held his secret meetings last year with the founder of Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, and with Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled the dossier, the Justice Department stripped Ohr of his deputy title and ousted him from his fourth floor office at the building that DOJ insiders call “Main Justice.” (read more)







In October 2016, the month where a FISA Judge granted the warrant for wiretapping and surveillance, the FBI (via Agent Strzok), and DOJ (via Deputy AG Bruce Ohr), were both in contact with Russian Dossier author Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS.


Nellie H. Ohr is working for Fusion GPS with expertise in Russian affairs at the time.


October 2016 is EXACTLY when The Obama administration submits a new, narrow request to the FISA court, now focused on a computer server in Trump Tower suspected of links to Russian banks. As Andrew McCarthy pointed out months ago: “No evidence is found — but the wiretaps continue, ostensibly for national security reasons. The Obama administration is now monitoring an opposing presidential campaign using the high-tech surveillance powers of the federal intelligence services.” (link)


Are you seeing how the dots connect?


June/July 2016 a FISA request is denied. This is simultaneous to FBI agent Strzok initial contact with Christopher Steele and the preliminary draft of the dossier.


October 2016 a FISA request approved. This is simultaneous to agent Strzok and Assoc. Deputy AG Bruce G Ohr in contact with Christopher Steele and the full dossier.


It would be EXPLOSIVE if it turned out the October 2016 FISA warrant was gained by deception, misleading/manipulated information, or fraud as a result of the Russian Dossier; and exponentially more explosive if the dossier was -in part- organized by the wife of an investigative member of the DOJ who was applying for the FISA warrant; the same warrant that led to the wiretapping and surveillance of the Trump campaign and General Flynn, and was authorized by FISA Court Judge Contreras – who was, until recently, the judge in Flynn’s case.


The Big Ugly

https://theconservativetreehouse.com...against-trump/

Wife of DOJ Deputy Was Fusion GPS Employee, CIA Research Aid, and Applied for HAM Radio License Month After Contracting MI6 Agent Christopher Steele…

Posted on December 12, 2017 by sundance



Sometimes a ‘Conspiracy Theory’ is not just a theory…

Department of Justice Assoc. Deputy Attorney General Bruce G Ohr was demoted because he had working relationships with dossier author Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS; and -more importantly or perhaps ‘conveniently’- according to James Rosen, Bruce Ohr did not reveal his October 2016 contacts with MI6 agent Steele or Glenn Simpson (Fusion-GPS) to DOJ leadership. (LINK)

(L-R) Nellie H. Ohr (Fusion GPS) and Bruce G Ohr (DOJ)

However, the ongoing Dossier story gets far more intriguing as it is now discovered that Bruce G Ohr’s wife, Nellie H. Ohr, actually worked for Fusion GPS and likely helped guide/script the Russian Dossier. (Link)

Contacted by Fox News, investigators for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) confirmed that Nellie H. Ohr, wife of the demoted official, Bruce G. Ohr, worked for the opposition research firm last year. The precise nature of Mrs. Ohr’s duties – including whether she worked on the dossier – remains unclear but a review of her published works available online reveals Mrs. Ohr has written extensively on Russia-related subjects. HPSCI staff confirmed to Fox News that she was paid by Fusion GPS through the summer and fall of 2016.

But wait, it doesn’t stop there… Mrs. Nellie Ohr was not only a Fusion GPS contracted employee, but she was also part of the CIA’s Open Source Works, in Washington DC (link)


Both Mr. and Mrs Ohr worked on a collaborative group project surrounding International Organized Crime. (pdf here) Page #30 Screen Shot Below




But wait, it gets even better.







A month after Hillary Clinton hired Fusion GPS (April 2016) to sub-contract retired British MI6 agent Christopher Steele to write the opposition research report “the Trump Russia Dossier”, Fusion GPS employee Nellie Ohr applied for a HAM radio license (May 23rd 2016); a communication tool that would allow Nellie Ohr and Christopher Steele the ability to communicate outside the normal risk of communication intercepts.
Keeping in mind, both Bruce and Nellie Ohr’s subject matter skill-set within the DOJ would provide them with a comprehensive understanding of how to network and communicate with international actors outside the traditional risk of communication intercepts. In short, Mrs. Nelli Ohr would know that using HAM radio frequencies would be a way to avoid the risk of U.S. intelligence intercepts on her communications.
The Clinton Campaign hired Fusion GPS in April 2016. Fusion GPS then sub-contracted retired British Intel MI6 agent Christopher Steele to write the Russian Dossier. A month later, May 23rd 2016, Fusion GPS employee Nellie Ohr gets HAM radio license.


So are we to believe it’s COINCIDENTAL? All of a sudden, a 60(ish)-year-old woman decides to use a HAM radio the month after contracting with Christopher Steele for a Russian opposition research dossier on Donald Trump?


Nonsense.


The more plausible scenario is MI6 Agent Christopher Steele and Mrs. Nellie Ohr knew any communication with foreign sources/actors could be easily monitored; and this need for communication was, most likely, going to lead to an organized operation where an FBI counterintelligence operation would exist -per Agent Peter Strzok- and, due to the subject matter being constructed, confidential communication would be required.


One way to ensure secure communications with parties external to the U.S. would be the use of HAM radio operations. You simply establish the frequency to use, and the time of the conversation, and presto. That’s it. “Red-Dog-One to Red-Dog-Two, come in?” etc.


Fortunately, this FCC license application now becomes evidence of an intent to subvert traditional communications intercepts… which, when combined with the other growing trails of evidence showing Fusion GPS schemes around the manufacturing of the Dossier, gets more interesting.


Mrs. Nellie Ohr, a Fusion GPS contracted employee, gets HAM radio license May 2016. Following along the timeline: in June/July 2016 an initial DOJ FISA request is denied. This is simultaneous to FBI agent Strzok direct contact with Christopher Steele and the preliminary draft of the Russian dossier.


Then in August 2016, Christopher Steele goes to Sir Andrew Wood to ask him to act as a go-between to reach Senator John McCain. [Trying to give his dossier credibility]


Meanwhile throughout July, August and Sept 2016 Fusion GPS is paying journalists (NYT, ABC, NBC, Washington Post and Mother Jones, etc.) to listen to Christopher Steele and simultaneously shopping the dossier to them.


Soon thereafter, October 2016 – The Obama administration, through FBI Agent Peter Strzok and DOJ Deputy Bruce Ohr, submits a new, more narrow application to the FISA court, now focused on a computer server in Trump Tower suspected of links to Russian banks. The second FISA application is accepted and a surveillance warrant is granted.


Simultaneously in October 2016 – Through the media in the past week we discover – Associate DOJ Deputy AG Bruce G Ohr, Nellie’s husband, is in direct contact with Christopher Steele, and the full dossier, along with secret meetings with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson.
.
Again, Timeline Recap:


♦April ’16 Clinton hires Fusion GPS
♦April ’16 Fusion GPS hires Christopher Steele
♦May ’16 Nellie Ohr gets HAM radio license.
♦June/July ’16 FBI Agent Strzok meets w/ Steele
♦June ’16 DOJ FISA request denied.
♦July ’16 FBI counterintelligence operation begins
♦Oct. ’16 Peter Strzok and Bruce Ohr meet w/ Christopher Steele
♦Oct. ’16 FISA request granted.






Last week U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras, the judge that appears to have granted Oct ’16 FISA request, is mysteriously recused *AFTER* accepting Mike Flynn plea in the first hearing.


No explanation is given for the recusal or why Judge Contreras waited until after the initial plea hearing.
It would be EXPLOSIVE if it turned out the October 2016 FISA warrant was gained by deception, misleading/manipulated information, or fraud as a result of the Russian Dossier; and exponentially more explosive if the dossier was -in part- organized by the wife of an investigative member of the DOJ who was applying for the FISA warrant; the same warrant that led to the wiretapping and surveillance of the Trump campaign and General Flynn, and was authorized by FISA Court Judge Contreras.
Representative Jim Jordan establishes “The Predicate“:
.
Representative Jim Jordan is “convinced the Steele Dossier was the underlying evidence for the October 2016 FISA warrant”. Part II:
.
CTH absolutely concurs with Jim Jordan’s outline and subsequent belief. All evidence points in only one direction. No evidence goes in any other direction.


The Steele dossier is a product aided by Nellie Ohr that underpinned the FISA application. The FISA application was a product constructed by FBI agent Strzok and DOJ Deputy Bruce Ohr under the authority granted to them by senior FBI and DOJ leadership.


Remember, as Director Chris Wray stated this past week, the FBI Director would be personally responsible for signing off on the October 2016 FISA application. In October 2016 that FBI Director was James












https://theconservativetreehouse.com...topher-steele/

Also.
Why did demoted DOJ official’s wife obtain this unusual license when she went to work for Fusion GPS in 2016?

By J.E. Dyer
December 11, 2017

Bruce Ohr. (Image via Global Initiative against Transnational Crime)

It looks like the biggest story to break today will be the one that Nellie H. Ohr, the wife of recently demoted DOJ official Bruce Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS in the summer and fall of 2016.
Of course, the day isn’t over yet, so we’re hedging our bets.

I’m thinking this can’t be a coincidence.

Fox’s James Rosen summarizes:

[I]nvestigators for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) confirmed that Nellie H. Ohr, wife of the demoted official, Bruce G. Ohr, worked for the opposition research firm last year. The precise nature of Mrs. Ohr’s duties – including whether she worked on the dossier – remains unclear but a review of her published works available online reveals Mrs. Ohr has written extensively on Russia-related subjects. HPSCI staff confirmed to Fox News that she was paid by Fusion GPS through the summer and fall of 2016.

Nellie Ohr has indeed written on Russia-related subjects, although what I can find indicates more of a historical than a current-events focus for her work. She seems to have had an emphasis on the Soviet era and its immediate aftermath. As Fox indicates, she was a history instructor at Vassar for some number of years.

For me, the most interesting aspect of her biography is that she has worked as a translator. Given her baccalaureate degree in Russian literature, her language facility is presumably in Russian. Online sources indicate she did research in Russia in the late 1980s, which, again, would indicate a Russian facility.

(Screen cap, author,

Dec 2017)We don’t know how her spoken Russian is, but if it’s functional, she looks like an ideal hire for what Fusion GPS needed in 2016: plugged directly into the DOJ, and with a language facility in Russian. Emphasis probably on the former.

It’s of more than passing interest that apparently, after that stint with Fusion, she was working for Accenture, the management services giant, through October 2017. According to Daily Caller, she was in the cybersecurity consulting branch, and gave a talk on a noteworthy topic that month:

She was employed at Accenture Security, the cybersecurity consulting firm, as recently as October.

On Oct. 3 she gave a presentation at the 2017 Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center summit on the topic: “Ties Between Government Intelligence Services and Cyber Criminals – Closer Than You Think?”

A description of the event reads:

The past year has seen cyberthreat actors arrested, indicted or identified in intelligence reports by US and European governments that many experts believe point to potential ties between government intelligence services and cybercrime actors. In this session learn about the drivers and mechanisms between state and criminal cooperation through a case study that will explore how seemingly ordinary cybercrime can be combined with strategic espionage.

Nellie Ohr doesn’t seem to have prior cybersecurity expertise in her professional profile. But Accenture has a number of revolving doors with federal agencies, think tanks, and consulting firms in the D.C. area, and donates money to politicians right and left.

The company may be best remembered by the public as the one that stepped in — without a competitive bidding process — to rescue the collapsing Obamacare website.

But Accenture also partnered with the Obama administration to address the global refugee crisis, mainly by importing refugees on work visas to work jobs in the United States.
All of that has the usual feel to it, and doesn’t seem to have much to do with the history and politics of Russia, per se.

But Ms. Ohr also obtained a particular type of license in May 2016 — a heavily freighted month in the Fusion GPS-dossier timeline — apparently just before, or just as, she went to work for Fusion. She acquired from the FCC an amateur radio operator’s license. The licensing document indicates that it’s the first one she had obtained.

The date of the license is 23 May 2016. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that she got her first amateur radio operator’s license just at that particular time. Perhaps her interest in amateur radio reached its zenith in the late spring in 2016, and she finally decided to do something about it.

As the screen caps illustrate, her classification is Technician Group D (novice), and is eligible to use radio service “HA – Amateur,” described here.

(Screen cap, author, Dec 2017)(Screen cap, author, Dec 2017)(Screen cap, author, Dec 2017)


For reference, according to sources in the UK cited by news outlets like the Independent, Christopher Steele’s contract with Fusion GPS started in May 2016.

Sources familiar with Mr Steele’s work said his for Fusion GPS started in May 2016 and stopped with the election.

And, of course, as the timeline I compiled in October indicates (link above), the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC hired Fusion GPS, through the law firm Perkins Coie, in April 2016.

It may be significant as well that the cyber intrusion on the DNC email system was detected on 29 April 2016 (see the timeline). We need not get fanciful, or ahead of ourselves, but one can obviously think of more than one reason why the use of amateur radio for communications with certain parties might have seemed like a good idea at that point, to at least some of the people involved.

It’s worth looking into. Let me put it more strongly: only a fool would fail to look into it.

J.E. Dyer

J.E. Dyer is a retired Naval Intelligence officer who lives in Southern California, blogging as The Optimistic Conservative for domestic tranquility and world peace. Her articles have appeared at Hot Air, Commentary’s Contentions, Patheos, The Daily Caller, The Jewish Press, and The Weekly Standard.

https://libertyunyielding.com/2017/1...sion-gps-2016/

Unrelated? Maybe, mabe not but but interesting.

7887 kHz, Your Home for Classic Cuban Espionage Radio

The shortwave radio signals that the alleged Russian spies were using are still surprisingly effective.
By Brett Sokol


The FBI documents that accompanied last week's arrest of 10 alleged Russian spies are alternately creepy—who knew the Tribeca Barnes & Noble was a hotbed of espionage?—and comical—turns out even foreign spies wanted to cash in on suburban New Jersey's real estate boom. With a nod to Boris and Natasha, the accused are also said to have used short-wave radio, a 1920s-era technology that, because of its particular place in the spectrum, can bounce off the atmosphere and travel across continents. The FBI's criminal complaint paints a picture of stateside spies hunkered down in front of their radios, year after year, in homes in Montclair, N.J.; Yonkers, N.Y.; Boston; and Seattle, furiously filling spiral notebooks with "apparently random columns of numbers" broadcast from the motherland.

Just as in the case of Cuban spies Walter and Gwendolyn Myers, arrested last summer in Washington, D.C., the clandestine Russian agents were tuning in to foreign short-wave stations transmitting strings of numbers—some in Morse code, others spoken by a recorded voice—that they then decoded into words. The so-called "numbers stations" carried regular broadcasts that could be heard by virtually anyone across the United States spinning their own short-wave dial past the BBC World Service or Radio France International, two of many neighbors in the shortwave spectrum.

It may seem like the digital era of spy technology has passed the Russians by. In the Washington Post, columnist Jeff Stein tittered that "the FBI must have been clapping its collective hands when it discovered the primitive radio techniques the Russians were using." But they aren't the only ones using short-wave radio for espionage. Great Britain has publicly admitted that its foreign intelligence agency, MI6, still uses "numbers" stations. And scientists have tracked numbers broadcasts to transmitters at government sites in Israel and (until they went silent in the late '90s) the United States. Here are two examples of what they sound like, from the Conet Project:


Recorded in July 1994 and believed to be an MI6 station.

Recorded in December 1991 and believed to be a KGB station.

The reason this dusty method is still ideal for espionage is that, even if you locate a spy station's transmitter, you have no idea who's tuning in across the hemisphere. Unlike telephone or Internet connections, receiving a radio signal leaves no fingerprint, no traceable phone connection, no IP address, and no other hint as to where the recipient might be. The omnipresence of these "numbers stations" has engendered a community of eavesdroppers who pinpoint the stations and even take their own stab at unraveling the messages—guys like 43-year-old Baltimore-area computer engineer Chris Smolinski. When he is not running his appropriately named Black Cat Systems software firm, he's managing the Spooks list, an online gathering of several hundred amateur spy-radio buffs from around the world, all carefully scanning the short-wave bands and logging the daily bursts of numbers that fill the ether.

Smolinski has a fairly elaborate roomful of gear, complete with a humongous outdoor antenna that one can imagine has inspired suspicious neighbors to call the FBI about him. But you hardly need such an expensive set-up to channel your inner James Bond. "A little $49 handheld short-wave unit can pick up any of the Cuban stations," he says. Just tune in to 7887 kHz at the scheduled time and, clear as a bell, after an introductory "Atención!"you'll hear a female voice reading off sets of numbers. [Example below.]

Recorded in February 1995 on one of several stations confirmed by the FBI to be used by Cuban spies operating in the U.S.

With the precise numbers-to-letters code known only to a spy and his boss—and with the code intended to shift with each new broadcast—the encrypted messages are theoretically almost unbreakable. Unless, as in the famed 1946 "Venona" case proving Stalin's infiltration of the U.S. atomic bomb project, an agent clumsily reuses a "one-time" code. Or, if the FBI surreptitiously enters the spies' homes and copies their decryption keys, as occurred during this latest case of Russian espionage and prior to the 1998 Miami arrest of Cuba's "Wasp Network."

Smolinski's circle doesn't have the resources of the FBI. But that hasn't stopped them from sleuthing away on their own. And thanks to the declassification of many of the Wasp Network's decrypted messages, Spooks devotees were able to verify one of their amateur decryption efforts—the code announcing an imminent rebroadcast of a Havana-to-Miami transmission if it initially went out garbled. As in the Venona episode, the sloppy repetition of a one-time code unlocked the key. This sort of slapdash operation is endemic to Cuban spy radio.

After 50 years of communism, Fidel's black-ops are, like much of Cuban society, barely holding together. "They make so many errors," Smolinski says. "Forget about supercomputers—with the Cubans I have visions of punch cards." The result? Broadcasts that sometimes play at the wrong speed or backward, or cut out midway. Radio Havana Cuba—one of the island's main outlets, with which the spy station apparently shares facilities—is sometimes patched in accidentally. Listeners have lately heard a Venezuelan state-run station interrupting Cuba's spy broadcasts. Is a thick-fingered operative trying to multitask while monitoring the latest news from Caracas? Or maybe just adding a dash of mysterious color to the odd world of spy radio?

Akin to an identifying password, each numbers station has its own eerily unique signature, ostensibly to help an agent tune it in. A vintage 1971 broadcast, thought to originate from East Germany's Stasi, opens with a rousing beer-hall polka and the Communist anthem "The Internationale" before continuing with the numerology. Magnetic Fields, a station whose origins are still puzzled over, begins with Jean-Michel Jarre's synthesized New Age tune "Les Chants Magnétique" before airing strings of Arabic numerals and the English phrase "again, again." The broadcast recorded from Moscow during the aborted 1993 Communist Party coup against Boris Yeltsin sounded a more ominous note: the number 5 repeated over and over for hours. Listen to the abridged clips below, respectively.

Recorded in 1971 and believed to be an East German Stasi station.

Recorded in the mid-'90s, this Middle Eastern station's precise country of origin is unknown.

Recorded off a Moscow-based station during the 1993 hard-line Communist Party coup attempt against President Boris Yeltsin.

"I've always wondered why our side stopped doing it," says John Fulford, a 62-year-old Spooks devotee and ham radio operator in West Palm Beach, Fla. Now semi-retired, Fulford spent the early '80s as a law enforcement official on South Florida's narcotics beat, tuning in to drug smugglers on the short-wave band. "They'd use it to communicate between trawlers off-shore and the coast. They'd be very open about it: 'We have a box of bananas coming in very ripe!' " When off-duty, Fulford kept his short-wave radio on, traveling up and down the Florida coast with his late friend William Godby, a retired Naval Intelligence officer and budding Spooks-ologist. The pair used signal direction finding equipment to track homegrown numbers station transmitters to locations ranging from the Palm Beach International airport to the heart of Miami—and all of the stations were aiming their signals at the Caribbean.

These days, Fulford says, the radio mysteries are coming from Asia. Spooks members have recently logged new Korean numbers transmissions between Seoul and Pyongyang, as well as a Vietnamese broadcast aimed at California.

And the Russians? "They're still here," Fulford chuckles. In fact, despite last week's arrests, both Russian and Cuban numbers transmissions continue to be beamed daily to … someone. So are there more sleeper agents still sitting quietly in front of their radios across America? Smolinski says to bet on it: "The assumption is that if they're bothering to be on the air, there must be someone out there listening in on the other end."

http://www.slate.com/articles/techno...age_radio.html