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Rh other words, I think my primary question was, is there anything that Steele, his sources or subsources told you that you didn't include because you immediately found it to be incredible? And I think your answer was no.

MR. SIMPSON: That is correct. My answer to that is no.

MR. GOWDY: And how did you assess the reliability of that information, given the fact that you did not talk to the sources or subsources?

MR. SIMPSON: So it's obviously a challenging thing to assess human intelligence, field interviews, and it is different from looking at a lawsuit. But there are similarities to the interview process in journalism, where there are elements of people, what people say that you can check.

And so, you know, for example, in one report they described how the Kremlin's election operation was being run by Sergei Ivanov, who is the head of the presidential administration, and, you know, gave a number of details about that. That was news to me. I thought if you were going to run an intelligence operation against the United States, you'd use the SVR. They'd be in charge.

As I dug into some of the more obscure academic work on how the Kremlin operates by some of the more distinguished scholars of the subject, I found that Ivanov is, in fact, or was at the time, in fact, the head of a sort of internal kind of White House plumber's operation for the Kremlin and that he seemed to have the kind of duties that were being described in this memo.

So either this person was familiar with some fairly obscure research or they knew what they were talking about. So that's the kind of work you can do. You can do a lot of that work. And that's why I think I can give a much more definitive answer on whether anything's been disproved, because, generally speaking, when you're evaluating things, you're looking for things that someone clearly made up. UNCLASSIFIED, COMMITTEE SENSITIVE