UPDATED: What Was Up With Bruce Ohr's Bonus?
After a brief hiatus, John Solomon is out with another provocative article. I take nothing away from Solomon's hard work, but his recent string of stunning revelations has the definite appearance of DoJ deliberately feeding information to Solomon, or pointing out available information that needs emphasis. And I love it! That seems to again be the case with New evidence shows why Steele, the Ohrs and TSA workers never should have become DOJ sources .
I'll dispense with some of the more or less extraneous information in the article and focus on what I view as essential. Solomon, for our purposes, first points out abuses in informant programs runs by federal agencies. Note that the abuse involves paying a federal employee for reporting information that he should be reporting in the first place:
Some examples of the DOJ’s problems with informers fall outside the Russia case but mirror the same issues unmasked in the now-debunked probe of Trump.
Take, for example, the DOJ inspector general’s finding this month that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was paying other government officials at the Homeland Security Department’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to work as informants.
The IG spared few words in decrying the idiocy of allowing government security officers collecting a federal salary to double-dip into taxpayers’ money by receiving informant pay to report criminal activity they were required by their jobs to disclose.
What does this have to do with the Russia Hoax? Was Bruce Ohr an actual informant for the FBI? A paid informant? At this point I believe the answer is, No. No, but only because DoJ and the FBI were a bit more clever than DEA.
We all know about Bruce Ohr's role in feeding the Steele dossier to the FBI and the DoJ itself, even as Steele was peddling the same material to media outlets and the State Department. Notice, I said "to the DoJ itself," because Ohr has testified that he was keeping DoJ officials who were subordinate to him--like Andrew Weissmann--"in the loop" regarding the Russia Hoax.
We also know that when Steele was "fired" by the FBI as an informant, Ohr served as the backdoor conduit for Steele's (and, importantly, Fusion GPS's Glenn Simpson's) material to the FBI. That was accomplished in part by turning his wife Nellie's Fusion GPS work product on Manafort and the Trump family over to the FBI--campaign oppo research gleaned from corrupt Ukrainian officials.
Now we come to the significant part:
Ohr also didn’t get compensated as a paid informant, like the TSA workers. But documents show a curious thing happened during the time he began peddling the anti-Trump intelligence from his wife and Steele: His annual performance bonus doubled from about $14,000 in November 2015 to $28,000 in November 2016.
Oh! That's interesting!
Question: Was that big increase in effect a payment for Ohr acting as an informant? Here's where this gets potentially sticky for Ohr, and others at DoJ.
Ohr has said that he kept subordinates "in the loop" on the Russia Hoax, but he has maintained, under oath, that he kept his superiors in the dark as to what he was doing beyond his official duties. Recall, Ohr was at the top of DoJ's non-political staff. So, very much to the point, he has stated that he kept Sally Yates--the person who would have had to have approved that twofold increase in Ohr's bonus--in the dark. Really? If so, then how did Yates justify that hefty increase? Because she had to justify it--in writing. Has she been asked about this? We know that she has testified under oath, as well. Did she approve a bonus for Ohr that had nothing to do with his official duties--that would have had to have been specified for purposes of the bonus? Did Ohr accept that bonus knowing all this?
Solomon doesn't ask these questions, but I'd be very surprised if it's exactly these questions that the person feeding this information to Solomon has in mind. In that case, there are people at DoJ (Ohr) or who were formerly at DoJ (Yates) who may find themselves under increasing pressure to cooperate. Maybe, too, this is what Joe diGenova was talking about when he said officials were rushing to be reinterviewed, to clean up their previous stories.
ADDENDUM: Another interesting aspect to all this. Bruce Ohr says Sally Yates was kept in the dark about his involvement. OTOH, Trisha Anderson, FBI lawyer who normally signed off on all FISAs, says that Sally and McCabe approved the Carter Page FISA before it ever landed on Anderson's desk . How credible is it, then--given the centrality of the Steele material to that FISA--that Sally was truly unwitting regarding Ohr's role? Was it the case that her putative lack of knowledge was maintained because she was the Acting AG during the early part of the Trump administration and was continuing to collude with Jim Comey? But now the plot, with all its moving parts, is becoming harder to conceal. Those earlier denials could come back and bite certain people where they would least like to be bitten.
UPDATE: I hope I wasn't overly coy in this post. What I'm suggesting that we should take from Solomon's reporting--as well as from what we already know--is that Barr/Durham may be targeting Sally Yates. She's in a really tough spot, IMO, not only because of her centrality to the original and first renewal FISAs on Carter Page, but also because of her role in the frame-up of General Flynn. If others start talking, she could be looking at some real serious felony charges: Defrauding the federal government of honest services, Conspiracy to do the same, Obstruction of justice, false statements on the FISAs, false statements to investigators. I'm quite sure this is not a happy time for Long Tall Sally. Recall how she was gonna be a Dem political star? Not so much. I'll bet she's spending a lot of time framing scenarios on how she stays out of jail. I'm equally certain that, from what she's been hearing about Jeffrey Epstein, she knows she wouldn't like jail at all. But who does she have to offer up?