Senior Justice Department lawyer was told Russia "had Trump over a barrel"

[Borealis]

https://apnews.com/4ac772445073491aa7d3ca9e558e0144

WASHINGTON (AP) — A senior Justice Department lawyer says a former British spy told him at a breakfast meeting two years ago that Russian intelligence believed it had Donald
Trump “over a barrel,” according to multiple people familiar with the encounter.

The previously unreported details of the July 30, 2016, breakfast with Christopher Steele, which Ohr described to lawmakers this week in a private interview, reveal an exchange of
potentially explosive information about Trump between two men the president has relentlessly sought to discredit.

They add to the public understanding of those pivotal summer months as the FBI and intelligence community scrambled to untangle possible connections between the Trump
campaign and Russia. And they reflect the concern of Steele, a longtime FBI informant whose Democratic-funded research into Trump ties to Russia was compiled into a dossier, that
the Republican presidential candidate was possibly compromised and his urgent efforts to convey that anxiety to contacts at the FBI and Justice Department.

The people who discussed Ohr’s interview were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the closed session and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Among the things Ohr said he learned from Steele during the breakfast was that an unnamed former Russian intelligence official had communicated that Russian intelligence believed “
they had Trump over a barrel,” according to people familiar with the meeting.

It was not clear from Ohr’s interview whether Steele was directly told that or had picked that up through his contacts, but the broader sentiment is echoed in Steele’s dossier.

Trump this month proposed stripping Ohr, who until this year had been largely anonymous during his decades-long Justice Department career, of his security clearance and has asked
“how the hell” he remains employed. He has called the Russia investigation a “witch hunt” and denied any collusion between his campaign and Moscow.

Beside the “over a barrel” remark, Ohr also told Congress that Steele told him that Page, a Trump campaign aide who traveled to Moscow that same month and whose ties to Russia
attracted FBI scrutiny, had met with more-senior Russian officials than he had acknowledged.

Ohr said he met in late 2017 with two senior Justice Department officials, Scott Schools and James Crowell, who told him they were unhappy he had not proactively disclosed his
meetings with Steele. They said he was being stripped of his associate deputy attorney post as part of an internal reorganization that would have occurred anyway, people familiar with
Ohr’s account say.

He met again soon after with one of the officials, who told him Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein didn’t believe he could remain in his current
position as director of a law enforcement grant-distribution initiative known as the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces program because the position entailed White House
meetings and interactions.

[elix]

I was going to say "Senior Justice Department lawyer seen polishing his resume", but Ohr is already on Trump's shitlist.

It says a lot about how the Trump presidency has distorted everything that this doesn't even register as shocking to me. It's another element of the Steele Dossier, more or less.

It's disturbing how normal all of this feels when it is far from normal.

[Sableye]

How dare he express concern that the presidential campaign was doing things that a seasoned intelligence individual would see as collaborating with a foreign power! damn the deep state for trying to apolitically defend this country from actual threats and not liberal threats!