Deep State: We've been saying for some time now that the entire investigation of Donald Trump for "colluding" with the Russians smelled like Deep State sabotage. Now, former associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr has confirmed that's true. If so, these are criminal acts. The only question is, what do we do now?
 
Both the Justice Department and FBI have maintained they didn't really know that Trump Dossier compiler Christopher Steele had any bias at all against Trump. And, even when they got their hands on Steele's unverified dossier on Trump, they claim they didn't know that Steele's employer, Fusion GPS, had any conflicts of interest.
Moreover, when they appeared before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to get the OK to spy on former Trump aide Carter Page, they didn't tell the court what they knew. They lied. Or at the very minimum, concealed the truth. This is a crime.
How can we be sure that top officials at Justice and the FBI knew all this?
Ohr said so. As John Solomon reported in The Hill,  "The then-senior Department of Justice (DOJ) official (Ohr) briefed both senior FBI and DOJ officials in summer 2016 about Christopher Steele's Russia dossier, explicitly cautioning that the British intelligence operative's work was opposition research connected to Hillary Clinton's campaign and might be biased."

FBI, Justice Knew

Ohr himself told congressional investigators, "I certainly told the FBI that Fusion GPS was working with, doing opposition research on Donald Trump.  I provided information to the FBI when I thought Christopher Steele was, as I said, desperate that Trump not be elected. So, yes, of course I provided that to the FBI."
Ohr at the time was the No. 4 official at the Justice Department, a powerful post. Even so, he claims he told the FBI that both his wife, Nellie Ohr, and Steele both worked for Fusion GPS. Hillary Clinton's campaign hired Fusion GPS through their law firm, Perkins Coie, to do opposition research on Trump.
But it goes even beyond that.
Ohr first met with Steele about Trump on July 30, 2016. He was alarmed at the vehemence of Steele's anti-Trump sentiments.
The following day, he met with both Andrew McCabe and FBI lawyer Lisa Page. They put Ohr in touch with FBI Russian counterintelligence head Peter Strzok, who later got fired for sending blatantly anti-Trump texts to his girlfriend Page. He was one of the main movers behind the Trump investigation.
In August of 2016, says Ohr, he briefed a handful of Justice Department officials, including Andrew Weissmann, then the top fraud official at DOJ, Bruce Swartz, who headed DOJ's international operations, and Zainab Ahmad, a terrorism prosecutor.
The names mean little until you discover that both Ahmad and Weissmann ended up working for Robert Mueller's Russia-Trump investigation. Then the circle, as the saying goes, is complete.
In short, FBI and Justice officials, working at times with the CIA's Brennan, got the ball rolling on the investigation of Trump. They knowingly used tainted, biased intelligence to spy on the Trump campaign.

Deep State Against Trump

They started a dirty campaign operation against Trump, used it to spy on him, then opened a special investigation that probed virtually all areas of his life and business affairs, not just his supposed collusion with Russia. It originated with the Hillary Clinton campaign. Yes, but it found more-than-willing participants in the remnants of Obama's national security and intelligence Deep State.
None of this behavior is legal, of course. The politicization of the FBI and Justice are crimes, plain and simple. As Roger Kimball recently noted, this is not on a par with Watergate — it's far worse. Our system is tragically broken when government officials can lie and deceive in an effort to thwart an American election.
This is the stuff of Banana Republics, where rule of law means nothing. That's not America, where rule of law is everything. But if these crimes go unpunished, we  will surely become a Banana Republic, too.