A GoFundMe account was set up for the Ohr’s in October 2020 and they received over $51,000 in donations for their legal costs.. (Credit: GoFundMe)
(…) As FBI investigators were looking into FBI records of Nellie Ohr, they hit a roadblock set by the Special Counsel’s Office:
“Relevant FBI/DOJ information related to this assessment was inaccessible to FBI investigators given that the Trump/Russia-collusion investigations were in FBI systems under ‘Prohibited Access’ status which, unlike ‘Restricted Access’ status, precludes investigators from detecting the existence of potentially relevant serials. In other words, when search terms that exist in the Prohibited Access-status cases are searched in Sentinel [the FBI’s case management system], the particular search will receive a false-negative Sentinel search response.”
From the Electronic Communication, it’s pretty clear that the agents Federal Public Corruption squad were not surprised by the segregation of the Trump/Russia records. There’s no doubt that the Federal Public Corruption unit would be familiar with the Prohibited Access status, as they have (until their recent disbanding) investigated fraud, bribery, and corruption of public officials, both elected and unelected. Most likely they restricted many, if not all, of their investigations in a similar matter.
After all, it’s natural that some investigations require more secrecy than other, especially ones that are politically-charged, involve threats to the homeland, or are otherwise sensitive. And the existence of the “Prohibited Access” level – especially with regard to Crossfire Hurricane – is not itself a surprise.
In fact, it has been known since December 2019 that Crossfire Hurricane was a Prohibited Access case. In his Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation, DOJ Inspector General Horowitz was informed by witnesses that:
“Because the information being investigated related to an ongoing presidential election campaign, the Crossfire Hurricane case file was designated as ‘prohibited’ meaning that access to the file was restricted and viewable to only those individuals assigned to work on the investigation. Agents and analysts referred to the investigation as ‘close-hold’ and, as discussed later in this chapter, used covert investigative techniques to ensure information about the investigation remained known only to the team and FBI and Department officials.”
Similarly, as our friend Walkafyre observed, the opening Electronic Communication for the Midyear investigation (which looked into Hillary Clinton’s transmission of classified information) stated it would be “designated as a prohibited investigation” due to its sensitive nature and “the damage its disclosure would cause.”
But it’s not only the political cases that are designated Prohibited. IG Horowitz, in his 2021 review of the FBI’s adjudication of employee misconduct investigations, noted that “documents and data uploaded into Sentinel are assigned one of the three access levels: unrestricted, restricted, or prohibited.” At that time, Sentinel was programmed so that FBI misconduct cases were “automatically designated ‘prohibited access.’”
So it’s not the existence of cases designated “Prohibited Access” being, by themselves, a scandal. But its rather the abuses that can stem from the prohibition. It cannot be forgotten that top officials within the FBI and the Mueller Special Counsel had a significant self-interest in the Prohibited Access designation, one relating to self-preservation and also their political desire to continue to their investigative pursuits. Sunlight was the disinfectant, though it came too late.
And we get an example of that abuse in the Electronic Communication released by Grassley. The Special Counsel’s Office (SCO) refused to provide a number of requested documents, including those relating to Nellie Ohr’s boss at Fusion GPS, Jake Berkowitz. Migration of the cases from Prohibited Access to Restricted Access was slow and incomplete. At other times, the SCO never provided documents to the search requests provided by the Federal Public Corruption.
That’s your scandal – using Prohibited Access as a way to not only insulate a corrupt case but to hinder the legitimate case against Nellie Ohr, with self-protection being the ultimate goal. (The other scandal being the still unexplained decision to not prosecute Nellie Ohr.) The timing is important – the materials continued to be prohibited, and the SCO continued to be uncooperative, even after the SCO had wound-down and Mueller had issued his report in the spring of 2019.
(…) Finally, on the topic of secrecy, apparently the FBI – apparently including former Director James Comey – had other means to hide documents. It was quite simple: keep paper copies but don’t digitize the files through the normal FBI procedures. (Read more: Techno Fog/The Reactionary, 6/5/2025) (Archive)