by the United States House Intelligence Committee

“ MR. GOWDY: Okay. So how did your work for Perkins Coie begin?
MR. SIMPSON: My recollection is we began to review what we had learned over the previous months and talk about what we would do, you know, now that we would have resources to pursue this -- some of these matters further. So it's -- when you get into that point of a piece of research, you begin to develop lines of inquiry and things that you think might be important, things you want to -- that other people are -- you know other people are interested in. ”

“ And then, you know, given the specificity of the allegations in the second Prague memo about their meeting in Prague, I have been -- you know, given the gravity of the allegation and the specificity of it, generally I have been waiting for -- I mean, I would sit down -- if that allegation had been made about me, I would sit down with my lawyer and we would reconstruct my whereabouts, and we would look through credit card bills and airplane tickets and, you know, my phone records. And there is many, many ways to account for your whereabouts in modern life if you want to. ”

“ It is inconsistent for us to release the majority memo and then to block, to issue a gag order on the Democrats from releasing to the public a minority memo. And I hope my colleagues, my friends on the other side will understand that incompleteness and seek to be consistent. ”

“ And so we spent a lot of time looking at them. I, as sort of an amateur student of Russian oligarchs and criminals, I hadn't come across them before. So I thought -- I at first didn't think they were that interesting. But as we've, you know, learned more about them, it's become more troubling.
You know, I now -- I know now that they've been -- the Agalarovs started operating in the United States around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union and are associated with people who are connected to previous episodes of money laundering that are serious, the Bank of New York scandal. ”

“ The problem is your staff isn't in any position to be able to vet our memo or your own for the equities of the investigation and sources and methods. Neither of our staffs is in that position. That is precisely why we have asked the FBI and the Department of Justice to do that.
We can wait a week. I understand the political stratagem. You want your memo to be out there for a week and the public to have only one version for a week so you can set the narrative. That makes this political exercise all the more transparent. ”

“ But in any event, we did look at some Kushner stuff and specifically focused on the project in Jersey City, I think partly because Trump had a position in that project, and discovered that it was -- one of the central mysteries of Donald Trump is that, you know, beginning in the mid-2000s he was not a creditworthy businessman.
And so he -- you know, so if you're analyzing, you know, someone who says they're a billionaire but can't get a bank loan, you know, there's this whole issue of where is the credit coming from. ”

“ It is obviously no secret that this investigation has introduced a very sharp and ugly brand of partisanship into the committee.
We are about to take a very, very consequential step. Because I understand, from the answers to my questions, that we will release the majority memos unredacted. And if there is to be a commitment to transparency and to symmetry, which I heard the chairman endorse, the minority memo will be released to the public in unredacted form.
Two things will happen: An immense amount of classified information will be made available to the public. ”

“ And I believe there are lawsuits in Toronto with similar allegations and the guys connected to the Toronto project are Russian mafia too. And, in fact, there's Toronto-based Russian mafia guys who are involved in the Panama project.
And in any event, so the origin of the allegations is defrauded buyers. The real chumps or the marks are the guys at the end of the process who come in thinking that they're going to be moving into a building that's already got all this, you know, financing and other tenants and it turns out that those people have walked away. ”

“ And if we were to put out to the public the most sensitive materials that they have trusted us to look at without asking them to conduct a review, without collaborating together to make sure that inaccuracies are not disseminated to the public, we will break the trust with them. ”

“ MR. SIMPSON: So, you know, I could probably think of other things, but I think one thing that is worth looking at is the relationships among people that are not known to be related, whether the Agalarovs know the Arifs, whether some of the other Russian oligarchs, whether they have social or business relationships, including that Roman Abramovich. And I think this question of the travel histories of Don Jr. and Ivanka, and whether they had other meetings with Russians is an area that is unexhausted. ”

“ There is nothing to be lost by giving the FBI and the Department of Justice a chance to give us their feedback before we take this unprecedented step unless we are afraid to hear what they have to say.
My secondary motion would postpone consideration of a vote to disclose publicly the classified document prepared by majority staff until the Department of Justice and the FBI have had an opportunity to brief all House Members in a classified setting on the potential national security and law enforcement impact or harm from such disclosure, including any impact on sources and methods. ”

“ You don't know how to investigate whether someone is engaged in corruption or whether they've got a bad business history. And so, you know, you hire someone who specializes in that kind of work. So we specialize in finding records and reading things and digesting large volumes of information.
MR. GOWDY: If I understood your testimony correctly, you don't specialize in political opposition research?
MR. SIMPSON: It's not a major line of business for us. It's, you know, every couple of years, 3, 4, when there's a Presidential campaign we get asked to do stuff. ”

“ And many of the oligarchs are also mafia figures.
And the oligarchs, during this period of consolidation of power by Vladimir Putin, when I was living in Brussels and doing all this work, was about him essentially taking control over both the oligarchs and the mafia groups.
And so basically everyone in Russia works for Putin now. And that's true of the diaspora as well. So the Russian mafia in the United States is believed by law enforcement criminologists to have -- to be under the influence of the Russian security services. ”

“ Like everyone on this committee, I take seriously the obligation to keep this Nation's most sensitive secrets out of the public domain. However, when there are abuses that go to the core of our democracy. Americans deserve to know.
Contrary to the claims made in the media, this committee has been transparent with the FBI. Yesterday Chairman Nunes and Chairman Gowdy discussed the memo with FBI Director Wray and provided him with a copy to review. ”

“ And what we, you know, gradually begun to understand, which, you know, I suppose I should kick myself for not figuring out earlier, but I don't know that much about the real estate business, which is I alluded to this earlier, so, you know, by 2003, 2004, Donald Trump was not able to get bank credit for -- and if you're a real estate developer and you can't get bank loans, you know, you've got a problem.
And all these guys, they used leverage like, you know -- so there's alternative systems of financing, and sometimes it's -- well, there's a variety of alternative systems of financing. ”

“ And I was in a terrible position. as I think we all are still, in that I was asked to vote on the majority memo never, despite being the second-senior Democrat on the committee, never having reviewed the underlying intelligence. I think all of us, perhaps, but two remain in that position.
So if that is true -- and I think it is true -- there is absolutely no way for any of us to game out what the outcome is 3 weeks from now when the press has done their thing, when the DOJ and the FBI have made their arguments, about who gets tarred for being imprudent. But it is going to be somebody. ”

“ And you know, we investigated -- so there was in one of the early memos, might even have been the first one, said "Money is being distributed in the United States through the auspices of pension payments." And you know, they are basically getting the money into the country and handing it out using fake pension payments. And this is like one of those things that I ran down as a way of evaluating the credibility of the dossier or of this memo. And so the question is, Well, do the Russians hand out lots of money in the United States through pension payments? ”

“ So, apparently, full transparency doesn't mean full transparency. It means release the majority view first and delay the minority view.
I hope the majority will reconsider. There is nothing that the House Members, upon reading this memo, can tell us, because they don‘t have any more access to the underlying documents than the rest of this committee. So that is the most paltry of excuses for putting off the disclosure of the minority memo. What are we to --
MR. CONAWAY: Would the gentleman yield for a second?
MR. SCHIFF: Yes. ”

“ Generally speaking, the market niche that we occupy is not the opposition research niche. I don't think our pricing structure is conducive to getting opposition research business, which is -- generally doesn't pay very well.
MR. GOWDY: Well, given that and given the fact that it's not your niche, why did the Washington Free Beacon approach you about doing the research on candidate Trump?
MR. SIMPSON: Well, one of our, you know, specialties that I think people know is that we are good at business investigations, corporate investigations, and Mr. Trump is a big businessman. ”

“ I thought it was a possible crime of progress and that there was possibly very serious crimes, but, you know, I'm an ex-journalist, so I'm not really in a position to prove that anyone's engaged in a crime.
I mean, you know, sometimes you do find proof of criminal activity in an investigation, but more often than not you find things that are suggestive or raise questions. And --
MR. ROONEY: Right. That's exactly my point, is that if we knew that Donald Trump was working with the Russian mafia to fund Doonbeg in Ireland, then there's no way he would be President. ”

“ MR. QUIGLEY: Mr. Chairman, the investigation you reference, when was that notion of the investigation brought before the minority to discuss? As time immemorial, we will have at least had some discussion about how to go forward with any investigations, much less of our own DOJ and FBI. When was that discussed with --
THE CHAIRMAN: Is the gentleman yielding?
MR. QUIGLEY: I am certainly --
THE CHAIRMAN: So as you are aware, we have issued several subpoenas that were opposed by the minority. We brought the -- this memo to make it available to the House. That was opposed by the minority. ”

“ MR. SIMPSON: No one hired me to investigate Hillary Clinton in 2015 or 2016. What did happen is that issues about Hillary Clinton came up in other investigations, and I can't remember the specifics, and I just remember they came up. A lot of times when we have a client come to us because of some business matter that is connected to politics or policy in Washington, the question of whether there was improper influence is part of the research. ”

“ MR. SIMPSON: Yes. I’m trying to remember. In general, we knew from the open source work that we had done that Donald Trump Jr. was -- had done a lot of travel to Russia and was involved in a lot of these discussions, that he'd done -- he'd gone to Kazakhstan for reasons that we didn't -- we weren't sure of, he'd gone to Latvia, and he'd been to Russia. And we eventually formed the view that the Russians were very interested in him or that he'd had a lot of deals with them.
I don't remember a lot of specifics beyond that. ”

“ MR. SIMPSON: I didn't share it with most of my employees. Yes, to answer you, generally speaking we compartmentalize things, both like a law firm would, and in running an intelligence operation you would too. So if we are -- so we don't tell one subcontractor what another subcontractor is doing. We don't tell our subs who our clients are. And we certainly don't tell one client what we are doing with another client.
MR. SCHIFF: And Ms. Veselnitskaya never fed you information that made it into the materials that you were providing your Perkins Coie client? ”

“ MR. SIMPSON: Well, we've only had a very small number of political clients. So I can tell you, I mean, our methodology doesn't really change. We -- my firm is -- all the principals are former journalists, so we don't come out of the political combat industry. We come out of the, you know, journalism industry, which is all about sort of sticking to the facts and not leaping to conclusions and not trying to, you know, come up with a hit piece on anybody. So, generally speaking, you know, what we get compensated for is producing reliable treatments of whatever the subject is. ”