[6:05 p.m.]
MR. SIMPSON: Come the end of October, some extraordinary things started happening. The Russians -- WikiLeaks releases John Podesta's emails, and then, you know, most extraordinary of all, James Comey sends a letter to Congress saying he is reopening the Hillary Clinton email investigation. And that was, I believe, around the 25th. And, you know, if you are me, you know, and you have been in politics and campaigns and investigations, and this is your whole world, and you have been doing it basically since you got out of college, you know, one of the things that you -- that is really ingrained in you is the rules of Washington—and when I say rules, I mean like regulations of the Justice Department about interfering with an election. It is not something that you are just aware of as a technical requirement, it is something the people embrace, which is that law enforcement shouldn't interfere in elections by announcing investigations of people at the last minute.
And so we were shocked, and I felt -- I mean, I guess I was angry. But in any case, you know, the result of that was predictable, which is that, you know, it began to influence the election. And, so, we tried to decide how to respond to that. And when I say "we," I mean like me and my little, you know, company, and Chris and, you know -- I didn't have any dealings with Mrs. Clinton or any of these other people. They were dealing with -- that was their thing. But I was sitting on this piece of knowledge, which was that, in fact, the FBI was investigating the Trump organization for possibly having illegal dealings with the Government of Russia. And you can imagine if you are me or Chris Steele and we have been sitting here working -- and they seemed to be very seriously running a
UNCLASSIFIED, COMMITTEE SENSITIVE
