Is Bruce Ohr being set up after saying he was told that Russia had Trump 'over a barrel'?

BRUCE OHR

THE CHINESE AMERICAN lawyer in the Republican crosshairs told House lawmakers that he was informed that  Russian intelligence thought they had the then-candidate  Donald Trump "over a barrel" during the 2016 campaign, a source with knowledge of the testimony told CNN. 

Bruce Ohr, who testified behind closed doors this week to the House Judiciary and Oversight committees because of his ties to the infamous Christopher Steele dossier about  Donald Trump's links to Russia, said Steele, a former British spy, shared that  information with him at a July 2016 breakfast, according to CNN's source.

Ohr, a 30-year Justice Department veteran, has been attacked repeatedly by Trump and his conservative allies for his connection to Steele and the opposition research dossier containing explosive and unverified information on Trump and Russia," reports CNN. Trump had called for Ohr to be fired ahead of his congressional testimony.

Ohr was “a non-figure, a non-entity in all of this,” one source familiar with the investigation told ABC News. “I don’t find a real significance to him.”

What may be worrisome to Ohr is that he is possibly being set up as the fall guy in the growing tension between Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Trump. Trump has already called for Ohr's firing and is threatening to remove his security clearance.

Democrats have defended Ohr, calling the interview with Ohr a “complete waste of time” and said Ohr “violated no law, regulation, or Department of Justice policy.”
Little is known publicly about the extent of the 10-year relationship between Bruce Ohr and Steele, but some House Republicans who are vocal critics of the Russia investigation have claimed that the the alleged link was proof of a conspiracy between special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.

Steele and Ohr knew each other from their work on organized crime before 2016. They met in the mid-2000s, people who know Ohr said, as both fought against the evolving threat of Russian organized crime for their respective countries.

Steele and Ohr, in fact, were involved in U.S. attempts to flip a Russian oligarch with ties to the Kremlin, The New York Times reports.

Between 2014 and 2016, the FBI and the Justice Department sought and attempted to turn Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska into an informant for the United States, the Times reported Saturday (Sept. 1).

Steele's comments reflect what he wrote in his dossier, which Republicans charge was political opposition research inappropriately used to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.  However, the FBI had already started investigating those alleged Russian-Trump ties before the Steele dossier contents were shared with the DOJ.

Republicans have seized on the connections between Ohr and Fusion GPS, where his wife Nellie worked, and Steele to suggest there was a coordinated effort to promote the Steele dossier within the FBI, according to another congressional source.

Ohr's wife was dragged into the so-called conspiracy because she worked for Fusion GPS. Ohr said that his wife, Nellie Ohr, who was a contractor for Fusion GPS -- the firm that employed Steele to dig up dirt on Trump -- mainly monitored Russian media for possible information. She did not work on the Fusion GPS dossier.

Ohr and Steele spoke multiple times in 2016 and into 2017. Ohr reported those conversations and his wife's work back to the FBI. He claimed to not have read the Fusion GPS  material contained in two USB keys, according to CNN.
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