The FBI and Justice Department officials Trump has been hounding are, oddly, all experts in Russian organized crime
If you are a reader of President Trump's Twitter feed or a viewer of Sean Hannity's Fox News show, you will know their names: Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, and now Trump's newest bête noire, Bruce Ohr. "How the hell is Bruce Ohr still employed at the Justice Department?" Trump tweeted on Wednesday. "Disgraceful! Witch Hunt!" It turns out, Natasha Bertrand reports at The Atlantic, these (mostly) former FBI and Justice Department officials all have "extensive experience in probing money laundering and organized crime, particularly as they pertain to Russia."
Ohr is a "career Justice Department official who spent years investigating Russian organized crime and corruption," and Trump's escalating attacks on him (and his wife) could fairly "be interpreted as an attack on someone with deep knowledge of the shady characters Trump and his cohort have been linked to," Bertrand says, including Russian magnate Oleg Deripaska, whom Ohr was instrumental in banning from the U.S. in 2006 "due to his alleged ties to organized crime and fear that he would try to launder money into American real estate."
McCabe, who Trump's FBI fired in March, "spent more than a decade investigating Russian organized crime and served as a supervisory special agent of a task force that scrutinized Eurasian crime syndicates," Bertrand reports. Page, who resigned from the FBI in May after her private text messages with Strzok were made public, was "a trial attorney in the Justice Department's organized-crime section whose cases centered on international organized crime and money laundering," and Strzok, fired earlier this month, was "a Russian counterintelligence expert."
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Trump "throwing U.S. intelligence officials under the bus, has, conveniently for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, persisted in making a spectacle of some of the Kremlin's biggest adversaries in the U.S. government," Bertrand says. You can read more about Trump's domestic targets and documented ties to Russian mobsters and oligarchs at The Atlantic.
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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.
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