Red Thread 1 is here.
Red Thread 2 is here.
The following will be brief -- more tidbit than part -- but first a little background.
In a striking double-omission, Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, in both his Senate and House interviews, failed to mention the name of one of his key, Russian-speaking hires who was working on the anti-Trump project for the DNC and the Clinton campaign: Nellie H. Ohr (star of Red Thread 2). Simpson was asked multiple times about personnel on Fusion Russian projects, and he, just, I guess, plumb forgot all about old Nellie.
Not that anyone believes that.
Nellie H. Ohr is the woman in the middle, not least because her husband is former senior DOJ official Bruce Ohr, who was demoted right before Fox News disclosed his secret meetings with both his wife's boss, Simpson, and one of Fusion's other Russia experts, former MI6 spy Christopher Steele. What was Nellie H. Ohr's role in the "dossier" project? Why did she apply for a ham radio operator's license in the spring of 2016? How did her marital relationship with a senior DOJ official factor into the Fusion anti-Trump "research" process?
Horse-barn-door style, Simpson filed a statement in federal court on December 12, 2017, confirming what little had already come out about Nellie:
The bank records reflect that Fusion contracted with Nellie Ohr, a former government official expert in Russian matters, to help our company with its research and analysis of Mr. Trump.
The one government position Nellie H. Ohr is known to have held was under CIA auspices as a researcher. Indeed, in 2010, while Nellie H. Ohr was with the CIA, she, her husband and Simpson all served together in an Expert Working Group on international organized crime. At Fusion, I guess it's always old home week.
In Part 2, I have combed Nellie's work for red threads, focusing on her work as an academic, first as a graduate student and later a professor of Russian history at Vassar.
What draws my attention today, however, is another Fusion subcontractor, someone with whom Simpson says "we have a long-standing relationship"; someone Simpson named in both his Senate and House interviews: Edward Baumgartner.
Here is part of what Simpson said about Baumgartner in the House interview:
He works for us on Russian things ... oh, heavens -- not a degree in Russian history from Vassar!
Could it be that Fusion's Edward Baumgartner was a student of Fusion's Nellie Ohr's?
Yes, Baumgartner attended Vassar between 1991 and 1995 -- which certainly does overlap Nellie H. Ohr's years of teaching there. In fact, it was in the fall of 1995, when Ohr published that favorite bit of mine (analyzed in Part 2):
She wrote:
To introduce students to the Stalin era can be a frustrating task. To convey the terror and excitement of the period, one can assign a memoir of a prison camp victim or an observer such as John Scott or Maurice Hindus. Such accounts, however, fail to explain the excesses of the Stalin era, and whether, in Alec Nove's words, Stalin was necessary ...
I don't know for sure whether Baumgartner studied Russian history with Ohr, but Vassar is a very small school. Maybe, just maybe, Edward Baumgartner proved to be Prof. Ohr's exception to the frustrating rule.
To be cont'd. ...