And/Ohr

Christopher Steele. Illustration by Cristiana Couceiro; photograph by Victoria Jones / PA Image / Getty via The New Yorker.

What do Christopher Steele and Omarosa have in common? Trump thinks they're both lowlifes:

Starting to be Revealed

by Donald J. Trump

‏The big story that the Fake
News Media refuses to report
is lowlife Christopher Steele’s
many meetings with Deputy A.G.
Bruce Ohr and his beautiful
wife, Nelly. It was Fusion
GPS that hired Steele to write
the phony & discredited Dossier,
paid for by Crooked Hillary & the DNC....
....Do you believe Nelly worked
for Fusion and her husband STILL WORKS
FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF “JUSTICE.”
I have never seen anything so Rigged
in my life. Our A.G. is scared stiff
and Missing in Action. It is all
starting to be revealed - not pretty.
IG Report soon? Witch Hunt!

OK, this is not nearly as insane as it looks; that is, the story, coming out of deep Nunes-land, is fairly insane, but what makes this look especially crazy is that Trump doesn't actually understand what's being alleged, only that there are all these names hanging out in it, of people who may for some reason not like him, and he's trying to convey that to us without revealing that he doesn't quite know the story, which is par for the course.

Incidentally I've learned what I think is the correct name for Trump's reading disorder: Specific Reading Comprehension Deficits (sometimes Disability), or S-RCD, in which the patient doesn't have the problems of translating letters to sounds that characterize dyslexia, but has trouble understanding what the sounds mean, as if he didn't recognize the language as one he speaks. I may get back to this at some point, probably not today.

I'd like to lay out part of a timeline here of Bruce Ohr and his connection to the Russia investigation in the hope of having a vague idea of what really happened, if anything, before we look at the horrors that Nunes and Trump are hoping to discover in the record, or in the report of DOJ inspector general Horowitz, if he's writing one on this subject, which I don't have any claim to knowing:

• 20 June 2016: Christopher Steele finishes writing and files the first (two-page) report in the investigation the Fusion GPS firm has asked him to do of Donald Trump's relationships with Russian political and intelligence figures (to supplement their own investigation of his business dealing in Russia), in which he recorded hearing (mostly, it seems, from the Belarusian-American businessman Sergey Millian, "Source D") that the Russian government had a longstanding relationship with Donald Trump and was thought to be secretly giving him damaging information they had obtained on his opponent in the US presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton, as well as offering certain business deals, and also that they had a file of damaging information on Trump, including video of him engaging in some disgusting behavior in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Moscow in 2013;
• 1 July: Steele sends a note to an American acquaintance he's known since maybe 2006, Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, suggesting that he wants to talk to Ohr, via Skype, about Donald Trump ("I am seeing [redacted] in London next week to discuss ongoing business but there is something separate I wanted to discuss with you informally and separately. It concerns our favourite business tycoon!")—we understand (though rightwingers won't) that he's truly disturbed by the stuff he's learning, in particular the thought that a possible president of the United States could be owned by Russian blackmailers;
• 5 July: Steele meets in London with [redacted], who turns out to be the FBI, apparently sharing with them that first file (in spite of his suggestion to Ohr that he wouldn't be talking Trump with them). It looks like he has that Skype meeting with Ohr shortly afterwards, maybe on the 7th, and he also gets a copy of the first report, around the same time, to the US State Department, it seems (according to Victoria Nuland, who says State told him it wasn't any of their business but the FBI's). He is very anxious to get somebody in the US government to pay some attention to this material; 
• 7-10 July: Trump "foreign policy adviser" Carter Page's visit to Moscow, during which he gave a talk in Moscow's New Economic School on Russia-US relations and met with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich, in addition, perhaps, to some other stuff;
• 11-12 July: Page arrives for a conference in London, where he meets with Professor Stefan Halper, who interviews him on behalf of the FBI; in Cleveland, Trump operatives work to make the Republican platform less hostile to Russia on the Ukraine question;
• 19 July: Steele completes a second memo reporting secret meetings during that second week of July Page took with Igor Diveykin of the Kremlin Internal Affairs department on the release of unspecified Clinton kompromat material and the Russian holdings of Trump kompromat material, and with Igor Sechin of Rosneft discussing the possibility that a Trump administration might drop Ukraine-related sanctions against Russia (it's the meeting where Page got the brokerage offer for the Rosneft sale, according to a Steele memo of October);
• 22 July: WikiLeaks starts publishing emails stolen by Russian intelligence from the Democratic National Committee (after a less user-friendly set of releases from the GRU itself as "DCLeaks"), in a format (searchable database with interpretive commentary) created to suggest, falsely, that there was some kind of illegal operation in the DNC to ensure Bernie Sanders did not get the party's presidential nomination and guarantee it to Hillary Clinton; not long afterwards, the Australian High Commissioner to the UK, Alexander Downer, remembers hearing from a drunk young Trump staffer about a similar trove of emails in the previous May and informs the FBI about this;
• 23-29 July (?): Steele completes and files the fourth of his memos (undated, but certainly at least a day after the 22nd), with sensational discussions of a conspiracy between Russians and the Trump campaign being managed by Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort with the "foreign policy adviser" Carter Page as an intermediary, according to a Russian-born Trump circle member ("Source E", probably Boris Epshteyn though I still want to think it's Felix Sater), which had already succeeded in embarrassing the Clinton campaign by arranging for the publication of the DNC emails, for a quidproquo ("In return the TRUMP campaign had agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue")—
• 30 July: Steele, in Washington, has breakfast with Ohr and his wife Nellie, a Russia authority who has been working with the Fusion GPS firm, at the Mayflower Hotel. The same day, he files a memo reporting information from a "Russian émigré figure close to the Trump campaign" on the storm over the release of the DNC emails: the Kremlin, he says, is "concerned that political fallout is spiraling out of control" and there is also "extreme nervousness" inside the Trump campaign, and both sides are interested in pulling back and trying to reestablish some kind of plausible deniability (he also claims that Trump associates have been Putin agents for years, supplying the Russian president with information on the US activities of Russian oligarchs); 
• 31 July: FBI opens an investigation of the Trump campaign, based, as far as we've been told, on High Commissioner Downing's story about drinking with Papadopoulos and a wild story about Russia, the Trump campaign, and a collection of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton's candidacy.

Laying it out like this is maybe a useful exercise in its own right—I think I'm seeing evidence here, for instance, that US intelligence was indeed watching Page on that Moscow trip, in the fact that Halper showed up to question him for the FBI on his way home. Whether they picked up the same story as Steele did or not I couldn't say, but I think his whole pattern of conduct would intrigue them. His (fairly crazy) New Economic School talk intrigued The Washington Post, after all, at the time, and they had no idea who he'd visited while he was in Moscow. The upshot of this is that the FBI really did have its own sources of information on Page's Moscow trip independent of the Steele dossier, which it must have used in the October application for a FISA warrant to observe Page, which is among the many things redacted from our view of the warrant (because of "sources and methods" involved in observing Page—including Halper, whose participation is still classified even though everybody knows about it).

The thing I like best about it is the way it shows Steele's work as that of a kind of blogger, worrying his subject like a cat worrying a piece of string, backing off and coming back, enriching the story in stages even as time moves it forward, with the information he gets from his sources and the information he gets from the newspapers. At the same time his alarm is growing, as his picture gets more detailed.

It's in this context that you have to see Steele's interactions with Bruce Ohr, in July and afterwards: something truly bad is happening between the US and Russia, something much weirder than he was likely to have been expecting, and he's very anxious to share the information he's acquiring with somebody who can do something about it, and he doesn't see the Fusion GPS client (if he knows who the client is) as being that somebody. He looks first at the US government—FBI, State, and the DOJ where he has a personal connection in the figure of Ohr; later, as we'll see (if I keep this up), all sorts of people from Richard Dearlove, his old boss at MI6, to, eventually, Michael Isikoff and David Corn, which will get him, at least temporarily, in trouble with the FBI. Far from conspiring, he's constantly working to open things up.