Remember that senior Justice Department official demoted last week for concealing his meetings with the men behind the anti-Trump dossier? It turns out that the man’s wife worked for Fusion GPS during the 2016 election.

So reports Fox News:

Contacted by Fox News, investigators for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) confirmed that Nellie H. Ohr, wife of the demoted official, Bruce G. Ohr, worked for the opposition research firm last year. The precise nature of Mrs. Ohr’s duties – including whether she worked on the dossier – remains unclear but a review of her published works available online reveals Mrs. Ohr has written extensively on Russia-related subjects. HPSCI staff confirmed to Fox News that she was paid by Fusion GPS through the summer and fall of 2016.

Bruce Ohr held secret meetings last year with the founder of Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, and with Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled the anti-Trump dossier. When Fox News broke that story earlier this month, Ohr lost his position as associate deputy attorney general, though he remains the director of the DOJ’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force.

News that Ohr’s wife worked for Fusion GPS may explain how it came about that her husband met with Simpson and Steele. In that sense, Fox News’ latest story suggests the answer to a question.

It also raises this one: Did the wife of a high ranking official in the Obama Justice Department work on the anti-Trump dossier? As Fox News noted, Ohr is a Russia expert, and Fusion GPS paid her through the summer and fall of 2016.

Then, there’s the question of whether the dossier was used by the DOJ when it applied for the FISA warrant that produced an order allowing the Obama administration to spy on the Trump campaign. Rep. Jim Jordan has surmised that the anti-Trump dossier was dressed up by the FBI, taken to the FISA Court, and presented as a legitimate intelligence document. Jordan suspects that Trump-hating FBI man Peter Strzok did the deed.

The fact that Bruce Ohr’s wife worked for Fusion GPS increases the likelihood that the DOJ made use of the dossier in its FISA application. If his wife worked on the dossier, that increases it further. The more connected the dossier was to high level DOJ officials, the greater the chance DOJ used its information, or so it seems to me.

As this commentator says:

It would be explosive if it turned out the October 2016 FISA warrant was gained by deception, misleading/manipulated information, or fraud as a result of the Russian Dossier; and exponentially more explosive if the dossier was -in part- organized by the wife of an investigative member of the DOJ who was applying for the FISA warrant.