On Tuesday, another member of the Barack Obama-era Justice Department’s deep state gave his testimony before members of the House Judiciary Committee in an eight-hour closed-door hearing. The DOJ official questioned was Bruce Ohr, who in 2016 was serving as the associate deputy attorney general but has since been demoted. Recall that Ohr’s wife Nellie worked for Fusion GPS, the firm hired by Hillary Clinton and the DNC to dig up dirt on Trump. It was Fusion GPS that hired ex-British spy Christopher Steele, who created the infamous anti-Trump dossier.

None of the above information is new, so what was the purpose of the hearing? Once again, the issue at hand is the congressional investigation into whether the DOJ and specifically the FBI abused its authority by misleading the FISA courts when it procured a surveillance warrant against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. In other words, to what degree were officials within the FBI knowingly engaged in a partisan hit job against Trump?

Following the hearing, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) told reporters, “It became very clear that there are a number of factual conflicts. Either Bruce Ohr’s lying or [Fusion GPS cofounder] Glenn Simpson’s lying.” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) echoed Gaetz’s statement, saying that there are “some conflicts in terms of who met with whom at what time, based on sworn testimonies.”

Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) noted that Ohr served as a conduit for Steele to pass information to the FBI even after the agency had terminated its relationship with the ex-spy over his leaking to the press. In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, Ratcliffe stated, “My real question walking in, Sean, was what did the FBI and the Department of Justice know about Bruce Ohr and his wife?”

And Gaetz seems to answer that question, stating, “Until today, we were not certain that the FBI knew all of the things at the time that they were making initial FISA application and subsequent renewals. What we’ve learned today is that the FBI was absolutely in possession of material facts that they withheld from the FISA courts.”

It appears more clear than ever that certain leadership within the FBI intentionally misled the FISA court with information they knew was dubious (at best), information they knew had been produced by a firm hired by Clinton and the DNC, salacious information they knew had been produced purely with the intent to smear a political opponent. And yet knowing all this, the FBI withheld this information from the FISA court in order to obtain the surveillance warrant. In so doing the FBI also sought to lend credibility to the canard of a Trump/Russia collusion plot. Essentially, the FBI used the Trump/Russian collusion narrative first to justify spying on the Trump campaign and, following the election, to justify its investigation into the Trump campaign.

So who was it that actually engaged in collusion and obstruction of justice? The more we learn, the more everything points away from Trump and toward members of the Washington establishment.