The newly released Nellie Ohr documents from Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, have already made waves for two major reasons. First, they show the FBI concluded Nellie Ohr lied to Congress and then failed to act on it. Second, they revealed an internal FBI “black hole” filing system designed to bury evidence that contradicted or disproved the Donald Trump-Russia narrative, shielding it not just from the public but from the FBI’s own agents.
Yet there’s more. Buried in the release is also confirmation of another key aspect of how the Russiagate smear unfolded, one that has so far escaped much attention: Clinton campaign operative Ohr appears to have had advance knowledge of the so-called “black ledger” operation by Ukrainian officials.
This operation ultimately led to the political downfall of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort in 2016. This information also provides more evidence that it wasn’t Trump who colluded with foreign powers against domestic opponents — it was Democrats.
While the broad outlines of this connection between the Clinton campaign and Ukraine have been known for some time, the newly released documents reveal the FBI was aware of Ohr’s foreknowledge as early as 2019. That’s when a report on her activities was written — but the FBI took no action.
Notably, this was before the first impeachment of President Trump, which was triggered by his inquiries into corruption in Ukraine. This detail confirms the strong likelihood that the Clinton campaign was more directly involved in the Ukrainian effort to smear Trump than was previously acknowledged.
The American public didn’t learn about the ledger until August 15, 2016, when The New York Times ran a front-page story accusing Manafort of receiving off-the-books cash payments from the Party of Regions, the political party of Ukraine’s deposed president, Viktor Yanukovych. But according to Grassley’s release, Nellie Ohr had already tipped off her husband, Bruce Ohr — then a senior DOJ official — along with two prosecutors from the DOJ’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, on May 30, 2016.
Even more striking, that alert came a full day before the first known public mention of the ledger in Ukrainian press. That May 31 article, co-authored by anti-Trump activist Serhiy Leshchenko, mentioned the ledger’s existence but made no reference to Manafort or U.S. politics. In congressional testimony, Nellie Ohr later admitted that Leshchenko was one of her sources at Fusion GPS and had passed along information about Manafort.
Leshchenko has been candid about his motives. Speaking to the Financial Times in 2016, he said his goal in publicizing the ledger was to intervene in the U.S. elections to damage Trump, whom he described as a pro-Russian candidate who could destabilize the global order. Notably, Leshchenko now serves as an advisor within Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s inner circle, a disturbing fact considering his history of actively promoting anti-Trump disinformation.
Ohr’s foreknowledge and contact with Leshchenko provide more evidence that the Clinton campaign, through Fusion GPS, was not only behind the fake Steele and Alfa Bank dossiers, but also acted as a conduit between Ukrainian political operatives and U.S. law enforcement. These efforts laundered foreign political propaganda into the DOJ and FBI under the guise of international criminal intelligence.
The ledger’s authenticity has long been in question. Manafort was never charged with receiving the cash payments alleged in the ledger and reported by The New York Times. Shortly after the 2016 election, Ukraine’s former domestic intelligence chief, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, expressed skepticism, pointing out it was suspicious only one fragment of the ledger had surfaced. “Where is the handwriting analysis?” he asked. “It’s crazy to open an investigation based on this kind of document.”
The orchestration also appears to go back even further. According to former Ukrainian diplomat Andrii Telizhenko, who spoke exclusively to me about the latest Ohr revelations, the operation began with a January 19, 2016 meeting at the White House.
Telizhenko, who attended the meeting as part of the Ukrainian delegation, said President Obama National Security Council official Liz Zentos, FBI agent Karen Greenaway, and impeachment whistleblower Eric Ciaramella led the U.S. side. According to Telizhenko, the goal of the meeting was to encourage Ukrainian prosecutors to dig up dirt on Manafort.
This timeline suggests the release of the black ledger wasn’t just a Ukrainian affair. It was a coordinated political hit, initiated by U.S. officials and, as the Nellie Ohr documents indicate, likely assisted from the start by Clinton campaign operatives.
After Trump’s election, Telizhenko became a key witness in the Senate’s Biden-Ukraine investigation, led by Sens. Grassley and Ron Johnson. For his efforts, Telizhenko was sanctioned by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for allegedly spreading “false claims” about Ukrainian corruption. But we now know there was real corruption and it may have run straight through the Clinton campaign’s Ukraine operation.
Manafort’s eventual prosecution by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team — ostensibly for tax evasion — was in many ways a direct outgrowth of the black ledger. Its real purpose was to pressure Manafort into “composing” about Trump, who was always the true target. That Manafort refused to do so speaks to his character, but it also shows how close the Ukrainians came to triggering a cascade of events that never would have occurred without help from Clinton-connected operatives and DOJ insiders.
The entire Russiagate narrative is built around the claim that Trump and his campaign colluded with foreign actors to undermine democracy. Yet the black ledger story makes clear that the real foreign collusion did not come from Trump; it came from his opponents.
This collusion reached the highest levels of the Obama administration, including senior officials at the National Security Council and the Department of Justice. Much of what happened, including coordination between Clinton operatives, federal law enforcement, and foreign governments, continues to evade public accountability.