WASHINGTON -- A senior Justice Department lawyer says a former British spy told him at a breakfast meeting two years ago that Russian intelligence officials believed they had Donald Trump "over a barrel," according to multiple people familiar with the encounter.
The lawyer, Bruce Ohr, also says he learned that a Trump campaign aide had met with higher-level Russian officials than the aide had acknowledged, the people said.
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 that 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 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 officials 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.
Steele and Ohr, at the time of the election a senior official in the deputy attorney general's office, had first met a decade earlier and bonded over a shared interest in international organized crime. They met several times during the presidential campaign, a relationship that has exposed both men and federal law enforcement officials more generally to partisan criticism, including from Trump.
Republicans contend the FBI relied excessively on the dossier during its investigation and to obtain a secret wiretap application on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. They also say Ohr went outside his job description and chain of command by meeting with Steele, including after his termination as an FBI source, and then relaying information to the FBI.
Trump last month proposed stripping Ohr, who until this year had been largely anonymous during his decadeslong 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.
The president and some of his supporters in Congress also have accused the FBI of opening the entire Russia counterintelligence investigation based on the dossier. But memos written by Republicans and Democrats and declassified this year show the investigation was triggered by information the U.S. government earlier received about the Russian contacts of then-Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos.
The FBI's investigation was already underway by the time it received Steele's dossier. The investigation's lead agent, Peter Strzok, told lawmakers in July that "it was not Mr. Ohr who provided the initial documents that I became aware of in mid-September."
Ohr described his relationship with Steele during a House interview Tuesday.
One of the meetings he recounted was a Washington breakfast attended by Steele, a Steele associate and Ohr. Ohr's wife, Nellie, who worked for Fusion GPS, the political research firm that hired Steele, attended at least part of it.
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.
The breakfast took place during ongoing FBI concerns about Russian election interference and possible communication with Trump associates.
By that point, Russian hackers had penetrated Democratic email accounts, including that of the chairman of Hillary Clinton's campaign, and Papadopoulos, the Trump campaign associate, was said to have revealed that Russians had "dirt" on Clinton in the form of emails, court papers say.
That revelation prompted the FBI to open the counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016, one day after the breakfast but based on different information.
Ohr told lawmakers that he could not vouch for the accuracy of Steele's information but has said he considered him a reliable FBI informant who delivered credible and actionable intelligence, including about corruption at FIFA, soccer's global governing body.
In the interview, Ohr acknowledged that he had not told superiors in his office, including Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, about his meetings with Steele because he considered the information inflammatory raw source material.
He also provided new details about the department's move to reassign him once his Steele ties were brought to light.
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.
Soon after, he met again 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.
CHERRY-PICKING CLAIMS
Separately, Democrats on the House Oversight and Judiciary committees say their Republican counterparts have cherry-picked from Justice Department documents to promote a misleading narrative about the private questioning of Ohr this week, according to a letter released Friday.
Rep. Elijah Cummings and Rep. Jerrold Nadler also questioned whether GOP lawmakers broke committee rules by using documents turned over to the House intelligence committee to question Ohr about his contacts with Steele.
The documents in question are Ohr's handwritten notes about his interactions with Steele as well as text messages and emails the two exchanged. The documents were provided to the House intelligence committee in response to a March request from Rep. Devin Nunes of California, that panel's Republican chairman.
In their letter to Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina and Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, Cummings and Nadler, who are the top Democrats on the Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform committees, write that Republicans on their committees were reading from the documents during Ohr's interview and using them to create a "highly misleading narrative with factually inaccurate interpretation and conjecture."
In one instance, members read from an email in which Steele wrote to Ohr that he wanted to discuss something with him informally. "It concerns our favourite business tycoon!" he wrote.
Cummings and Nadler write that Republicans had interpreted the communication to refer to Trump, an assertion echoed in some recent news reports. But during his interview, Ohr told the committee that Steele was referring to Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, who has close ties to President Vladimir Putin and once employed Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, as a consultant.
Cummings and Nadler expressed "serious concerns" with the way the Republicans had handled the material.
Copies of portions of the documents have been published online by various media organizations.
"It is unclear whether Republican members consulted with the department prior to distributing these highly sensitive documents more widely or before using them during the interview with Mr. Ohr," Cummings and Nadler said.
They ask that Gowdy and Goodlatte schedule a bipartisan meeting with the Justice Department to discuss the sensitivity of the documents, which they say contain details about a confidential human source
They also ask that Republicans turn over all of the documents they've obtained to their Democratic counterparts.
Gowdy, who is also a member of the House Intelligence Committee, "reviewed these documents when they were first produced to [the intelligence panel] in March," said his spokesman, Amanda Gonzalez. "He has never once shared these documents with a single individual outside of [the committee]." If members have concerns that sensitive information was released, they should raise their concerns with the intelligence or ethics committee, she said.
Goodlatte, who was not at the Ohr interview, did not respond to a request for comment.
A Democratic aide on the House intelligence committee said no vote had been taken by that panel to allow the sharing or release of information provided by the Justice Department for Ohr's questioning.
The aide, who wasn't authorized to discuss the committee's confidential work and spoke on condition of anonymity, said it would be a violation of committee rules for the Judiciary or Oversight committee Republicans to have used any material shared with the House intelligence committee without such a vote.
Information for this article was contributed by Eric Tucker, Chad Day and Mary Clare Jalonick of The Associated Press; and by Ellen Nakashima of The Washington Post.
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