A senior Department of Justice (DOJ) executive may have broken the law by failing to disclose the fact that his wife worked at Fusion GPS, the firm that employed a former British spy for opposition research on President Donald Trump.

Bruce Ohr (shown at right, above), the now-former associate deputy attorney general, merely disclosed that his wife worked as a “cyberthreat analyst” in 2016, according to Luke Rosiak of The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Rosiak reported Thursday that this description could have been a deception, since the ethics forms require officials to “provide the name of your spouse’s employer. In addition, if your spouse’s employer is a privately held business, provide the employer’s line of business.”

Bruce Ohr is married to Nellie Ohr, who helped Fusion GPS research then-candidate Trump in 2016.

The forms help DOJ avoid conflicts of interest, the exact problem that Bruce Ohr would soon face in December 2017, when Justice Department officials learned of Nellie Ohr’s Fusion GPS employment, along with meetings Bruce Ohr may have had in the summer of 2016. He was demoted and returned to his prior position as head of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force.

Nellie Ohr is a former CIA employee with a specialty in Russia.

It is unclear if Bruce Ohr was demoted because of the forms, or because he failed to disclose meetings with Fusion GPS officials in the summer of 2016.

As The Daily Caller reported, it was Bruce Ohr who first brought the Fusion GPS research to the attention of the FBI and the DOJ in mid-2016. Some of the research was done by Fusion GPS contractor Christopher Steele, a former British spy who had been stationed in Russia more than 20 years ago. His part of the research is known as the “Steele dossier.”

The dossier alleged Trump had been turned into a Russian asset, and was willing to do Russian bidding should he win the presidential election. Steele shopped the dossier to press outlets around Election Day in 2016, all while the FBI was also looking at the research.

The DOJ was not aware Bruce Ohr had met with top Fusion GPS officials in the summer of 2016.

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DOJ and FBI officials used the dossier as the primary basis of their application for approval by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to spy on Carter Page, a low-level Trump campaign volunteer, according to classified information summarized in a four-page memo by House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.).

PoliZette White House writer Jim Stinson can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter.

(photo credit, homepage image: Robert Mueller, CC BY 2.0, by Ryan J. Reilly)