Nellie Ohr isn’t a new name in the Russiagate saga, but newly released documents from Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office shatter the fiction that she was just a low-level researcher and reveal her as a key conduit between Clinton operatives, the DOJ, and the FBI. The documents also pull back the curtain on a darker truth: an internal black hole FBI system designed not just to restrict access to sensitive Russiagate documents, but to bury them so completely that even FBI agents tasked with finding them wouldn’t know they existed.
What was already known about Nellie Ohr is that she worked for Fusion GPS — an opposition research firm led by former Wall Street Journal reporters Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch — who were hired by the Clinton campaign in April 2016 to manufacture the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. At the same time, her husband, Bruce Ohr, was a senior official at the Department of Justice. It was also known that Nellie Ohr gathered open-source information on various figures, including Trump campaign advisor Carter Page, which was then twisted to fit the collusion narrative. What was not known — until now — is just how deeply involved she was in the Trump-Russia collusion smear, how brazenly she lied to cover it up, and how the FBI actively aided in the cover-up.
According to the newly released document from Sen. Grassley’s office, a previously unseen 43-page FBI analysis from 2019, Nellie Ohr was involved in many aspects of the Russia collusion hoax, including in the drafting of the Steele Dossier. The FBI analysis was initiated after then-Congressman Mark Meadows filed a criminal referral, alleging that Ohr had lied to Congress during her 2018 testimony about her role in producing supposed research that helped trigger the Trump-Russia investigation. Meadows had good reason to be suspicious.
As the analysis concluded, Nellie Ohr repeatedly lied under oath. The FBI found that despite her denials, she contributed directly to the writing of the Steele Dossier. One telling clue was an identical analytical error that appeared both in her research and in the dossier itself. Even more damning, the FBI recovered a deleted “FSB report” from a thumb drive which Fusion owner Simpson had given to Bruce Ohr to give to the FBI in December 2016. That same fictitious report had already appeared as part of the dossier given to the FBI by Steele two months earlier, in October 2016. The FSB report bore all the hallmarks of Nellie Ohr’s work, which likely explains why Simpson, or whoever created the thumb drive, deleted the report just four minutes after uploading it, before eventually giving it to Bruce Ohr to pass to the FBI. What they didn’t realize was that what they tried to hide was still recoverable.
It’s long been suspected that former British intelligence agent turned Clinton operative Christopher Steele’s role wasn’t to generate the dossier’s content himself but to act as a cutout, lending British intelligence credibility to stories manufactured by Fusion GPS operatives and Clinton campaign affiliates. That part of the operation was wildly successful. To this day, many still believe it was Steele who wrote the dossier’s stories, when in reality, he was just the frontman.
The FBI analysis also reviewed emails of Trump-Russia material sent directly by Ohr to DOJ prosecutors, including individuals she never disclosed to Congress. Further, while under oath, Ohr claimed to have had no knowledge of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, insisting that her work for Fusion just happened to align with it. Those claims were also false. In reality, she was deeply embedded in the FBI-DOJ pipeline. Far from a passive researcher, she functioned as a conduit between Clinton-funded smear artists and federal law enforcement.
The FBI discovered that she deleted emails, met multiple times with Steele, and lied to Congress about when she took ham radio classes. In truth, she became familiar with ham radio concurrently while working on the Russia collusion hoax, likely as a way to evade digital surveillance. Additionally, she was involved in the so-called Alfa Bank dossier, a fraudulent document pushed to the FBI by Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann in an attempt to spark yet another investigation into Trump. In short, Nellie Ohr was no low-level researcher. She was a central player and a key conduit linking the FBI, DOJ, and Clinton operatives driving the smear campaign.
But as bad as all that is, the bigger scandal may be how the FBI handled this information. Instead of referring her for prosecution, they buried the evidence. The FBI analysis of Ohr’s lies was hidden and is only coming to light now, six years later, conveniently after the five-year statute of limitations for lying to Congress expired. Perhaps even worse, the report exposes the FBI’s “black hole” system, where sensitive documents are dumped into “prohibited files” that remain unsearchable, even by other agents. This systemic opacity was repeatedly flagged by the very analyst who wrote the FBI’s report on Nellie Ohr:
“‘Prohibited Access’ status precludes investigators from detecting the existence of potentially relevant serials (…) when search terms that exist in the Prohibited Access–status cases are searched in Sentinel, the particular search will receive a false-negative Sentinel search response.”
In other words, there’s likely far more that remains hidden to this day, or “unknown unknowns,” as Donald Rumsfeld famously put it. One critical question is whether Inspector General Michael Horowitz or Special Counsel John Durham ever had access to the FBI’s black hole system. The answer is that they probably did not.
Another disturbing detail, also discussed in the FBI analysis, is something internet sleuths first uncovered in 2019 when Judicial Watch obtained a FOIA release on Bruce Ohr–related documents. Buried in the records was a seemingly minor point: Nellie and Bruce Ohr traveled to Prague in February 2016. That stood out, not only because Prague was the city falsely cited in the Steele Dossier as the site of a covert meeting between Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and Russian officials, but also because, according to Wikileaks emails, February 2016 was the same month the Clinton campaign first discussed its anti-Trump smear operation, internally dubbed the “swift boat project.”
But there’s more to the Prague story. What online sleuths didn’t know back in 2019 — because the government FOIA censors conveniently redacted the name, supposedly for “privacy reasons” — was known to the FBI analyst tasked with investigating Nellie Ohr’s lies to Congress: Bruce and Nellie Ohr were accompanied on their February 2016 trip to Prague by none other than Timothy Thibault.
Yes, that Timothy Thibault. The disgraced FBI agent who could be described as an evil Forrest Gump: always popping up where the action is, always doing the wrong thing. Thibault was the agent who sabotaged the Hunter Biden laptop investigation, shutting it down under the bogus claim that it was Russian disinformation. He then manipulated FBI systems to make sure the case couldn’t be reopened, eerily similar to the black hole treatment given to files in the Nellie Ohr case.
He also oversaw the suppression of whistleblower Tony Bobulinski’s allegations about the Biden family’s business dealings. And when it came to the 2020 election, Thibault launched “Operation Arctic Frost” to seize government-issued cell phones from President Trump, Mike Pence, and other top officials, in an effort to tie Trump to the so-called “fake electors” narrative.
Indeed, the FBI analyst who investigated Meadows’ referral on Nellie Ohr not only knew that Thibault had traveled to Prague, but remarked that Nellie Ohr was “remarkably well connected” and questioned why Thibault went with the Ohrs in the first place. It remains one of the lingering, unexplained threads of Russiagate. There’s no direct evidence linking this trip to an anti-Trump operation but the coincidence is hard to ignore. Prague was a key element in the fraudulent Steele Dossier, and Nellie Ohr was feeding information into both the dossier and the DOJ’s Trump-Russia investigation. Maybe some of the answers are buried in the FBI’s black hole system.
In the end, it’s the same story: Nellie Ohr was caught, repeatedly and provably, lying to Congress. But instead of facing justice, she was protected. Like everyone else who pushed the Russia collusion lies, and the list is long, she walks away scot-free.
