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Rh MR. GOWDY: Right. And I'm asking you how you knew that?

MR. SIMPSON: And I'm -- I don't know what to tell you other than that I was generally aware that Perkins Coie represented the DNC.

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.

So we began to develop more specific lines of inquiry. So they would be -- so the things that we started looking at specifically were a lot of Mr. Trump's overseas business deals, his history with regard to tax disputes. We were very interested in things like his clothing line and where his -- you know, he -- I can't remember exactly when this came up, but we gradually figured out that he -- while he was running on a platform of economic nationalism that he's outsourced his clothing line to developing countries. So we were interested in the labor practices around his factories.

You know, we had gradually accumulated more and more things about his bankruptcies. And we had gotten a better sense of who his business partners were. So those were issues. So we sort of -- when we reached an agreement about, you know, funding and we thought we would have funding to do a bunch of things, we began to look for people who could help us pursue some of these things.

And -- guess that's a general description of what we began to do.

MR. GOWDY: Were the lines of inquiry dictated by the client or suggested UNCLASSIFIED, COMMITTEE SENSITIVE