The FBI and Justice Department officials Trump has been hounding are, oddly, all experts in Russian organized crime

Bruce Ohr, Justice Department official
(Image credit: Zach Gibson/Getty Images)

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."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

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.

Continue reading for free

We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.

Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.

Peter Weber

Peter Weber is a senior editor at TheWeek.com, and has handled the editorial night shift since the website launched in 2008. A graduate of Northwestern University, Peter has worked at Facts on File and The New York Times Magazine. He speaks Spanish and Italian and plays bass and rhythm cello in an Austin rock band. Follow him on Twitter.