Page:Simpson-transcript-redacted.pdf/143

Glenn SimpsonPage 143 particular, you know, several in the former Soviet Union, Georgia, Azerbaijan, both former Soviet republics. So over the course of the spring I'd say — and Russia — we gradually began to exhaust the public record, the open source about these topics in various places. As you, you know, sort of run short on public record or open source information, you know, you need to get — if you still want to go deeper you need to get human source.

So the purpose of this was to see if we could learn more, generally speaking, about his business dealings in Russia. What came back was something, you know, very different and obviously more alarming, which had to do with — you know, which outlined a political conspiracy and a much broader set of issues than the ones that we basically went looking for. You know, initially we didn't know what do with this.

The main thing we did with it, the use we made of it was as intelligence, which is to understand what's happening. So when this arrived the first indicators were starting to float around that there was something bigger going on, the government of Russia or someone was doing some 1-800-FOR-DEPO