Nellie Ohr isn’t a new name in the Russiagate saga, but newly released documents from Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office shatter the fiction that she was just a low-level researcher and reveal her as a key conduit between Clinton operatives, the DOJ, and the FBI. The documents also pull back the curtain on a darker truth: an internal black hole FBI system designed not just to restrict access to sensitive Russiagate documents, but to bury them so completely that even FBI agents tasked with finding them wouldn’t know they existed.
What was already known about Nellie Ohr is that she worked for Fusion GPS — an opposition research firm led by former Wall Street Journal reporters Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch — who were hired by the Clinton campaign in April 2016 to manufacture the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. At the same time, her husband, Bruce Ohr, was a senior official at the Department of Justice. It was also known that Nellie Ohr gathered open-source information on various figures, including Trump campaign advisor Carter Page, which was then twisted to fit the collusion narrative. What was not known — until now — is just how deeply involved she was in the Trump-Russia collusion smear, how brazenly she lied to cover it up, and how the FBI actively aided in the cover-up.
According to the newly released document from Sen. Grassley’s office, a previously unseen 43-page FBI analysis from 2019, Nellie Ohr was involved in many aspects of the Russia collusion hoax, including in the drafting of the Steele Dossier. The FBI analysis was initiated after then-Congressman Mark Meadows filed a criminal referral, alleging that Ohr had lied to Congress during her 2018 testimony about her role in producing supposed research that helped trigger the Trump-Russia investigation. Meadows had good reason to be suspicious.
As the analysis concluded, Nellie Ohr repeatedly lied under oath. The FBI found that despite her denials, she contributed directly to the writing of the Steele Dossier. One telling clue was an identical analytical error that appeared both in her research and in the dossier itself. Even more damning, the FBI recovered a deleted “FSB report” from a thumb drive which Fusion owner Simpson had given to Bruce Ohr to give to the FBI in December 2016. That same fictitious report had already appeared as part of the dossier given to the FBI by Steele two months earlier, in October 2016. The FSB report bore all the hallmarks of Nellie Ohr’s work, which likely explains why Simpson, or whoever created the thumb drive, deleted the report just four minutes after uploading it, before eventually giving it to Bruce Ohr to pass to the FBI. What they didn’t realize was that what they tried to hide was still recoverable.
It’s long been suspected that former British intelligence agent turned Clinton operative Christopher Steele’s role wasn’t to generate the dossier’s content himself but to act as a cutout, lending British intelligence credibility to stories manufactured by Fusion GPS operatives and Clinton campaign affiliates. That part of the operation was wildly successful. To this day, many still believe it was Steele who wrote the dossier’s stories, when in reality, he was just the frontman.
Hellbound and Down 