The New York Times, which serves as a pilot fish for the rest of the media, has been working hard to minimize the damage he might do. On August 17, as Ohr's name was being introduced to inhabitants of the MSM bubble thanks to a threat by President Trump to remove his security clearance, the Times outright lied about his position in the Department of Justice, calling him a "midlevel" official in the DOJ. This lie was picked up and repeated in many other articles and was used on cable news reports extensively, thereby falsely branding him as a minor player caught up and persecuted by Trump and anyone else paying attention.

You can almost smell the fear in the Get Trump camp that Bruce Ohr might be the thread that could be pulled to unravel the conspiracy of high-ranking officials to spy on the Trump campaign and then, after the election, put into action the " insurance policy " Peter Strzok mentioned to his mistress (and co-worker) Lisa Page in an August 2016 text message, to remove a duly elected president from office.

Ohr was, prior to his demotion, the top-ranked career official (i.e., not a political appointee) in the Justice Department. While the Times has not (so far as I have been able to discover) issued an official correction for this lie, the day before yesterday, it called him a "senior career Justice Department official" and yesterday, in its report on the hearing (didn't the Times cover this itself?), ran an Associated Press report that called him "a high-ranking official in the deputy attorney general's office" but identified his significance in the lede as "[a] longtime government lawyer who has become a central figure in President Donald Trump's efforts to undermine the Russia investigation." Other media went along with this Ohr-as-victim party line; CNN, for instance, called him the "Justice Department official in Trump's crosshairs."

One side benefit of Ohr's appearance is that we now finally have more than one picture of Ohr. Up until yesterday, the sole picture of the former number-four official in the Obama Justice Department was from the ceremony accompanying an award he had received years ago. Here is a new head shot taken from Fox News video of his arrival:

There are two closely related dangers for the bureaucratic, political, and media coalition that seeks to eject Trump from the body politic and teach the lesson to any future potential disruptor of the Establishment that such a mission is both dangerous and futile.

The first danger is exposure of the Obama administration's spying on the candidate running against its designated successor, Hillary Clinton. As many have noted, this is the same motive as the Watergate burglary, only of a magnitude a thousand times greater. The ability of the NSA to monitor every form of electronic communication (except ham radio – as employed by Bruce Ohr's wife, Nellie) means that virtually all significant information in the Trump campaign was available, so long as the officials in question were in communication with one of the people named in the FISA warrants obtained by the cabal operatives.

The second danger is that it is becoming increasingly clear that the Mueller special counsel probe is the direct outgrowth of the cabal's efforts to gin up unfounded allegations of Trump campaign collusion with Russia. Bruce Ohr's role in this effort may be critical because he violated Department of Justice procedures and kept his supervisors ignorant of his serving as a cut-out, then continuing to utilize Democrat-commissioned, Russian-sourced unsubstantiated information in the Steele Dossier in obtaining four warrants from the FISA Court. Ohr probably will face professional ruin and possibly prison time, especially if he gets caught in a perjury trap. He might even cut a deal to testify, if a prosecution is ever undertaken, by John Huber or anyone else.

The hearing at which Ohr testified was "closed door," meaning no reporters and no cameras. No Democrat members of the two committees that held the hearing attended, though staffers of Democrats were allowed to ask questions. An amusing sidelight is that even though this was the first public appearance of Ohr, there didn't seem to be a mob of reporters shouting questions at him as he entered and left. Fox News's Catherine Herridge had no company as she gamely attempted to get Ohr to respond to her questions on his way in.

Two Republicans at the hearing have spoken out.

Darrell Issa was fairly forthcoming, speaking with Mollie Line of Fox News (full interview embedded below). He indicated that Ohr had disclosed to FBI officials his wife's work for Fusion GPS and named names, but this didn't get back to the DOJ and his bosses, apparently, and never made it into the FISA warrants. This is ammunition to squeeze those officials (Peter Strzok? Sally Yates? others?) about their roles in defrauding the FISA Court.

Issa noted that "Bruce has a poor memory" that enabled him to avoid outright refusals to answer questions.

Issa also said (transcript by author):

As an attorney he did something he never should have done: he became part of the continuity of evidence; he became a fact witness ... became part of an investigation that was funded by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton, and pursued by Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who obviously had real hatred for the president.

Issa also said that Ohr admitted this (back-channel communication) had never happened in his 30-year career.

Gregg Jarrett of Fox News, author of the best-selling book The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump, explains the role of Ohr: