then provided to me.
In any event, we eventually were able to confirm that the story was basically true, that this guy was a gangster, he was known to western law enforcement as a gangster, and he, in fact, had been prosecuted and thrown in jail for this extortion racket.
So then the question was, well, how did this story get from a convicted gangster in Moscow into a Justice Department forfeiture complaint? And so the lawyers, the Baker lawyers deposed a government agent, an ICE agent who did the work, did the investigation, and he said he got it from this businessman named William Browder.
And so then the question became, well, where did Browder get it from? Did he get it from the gangster, or was it, you know, from some other source? So we began to try to do various types of discovery to figure all that out. So I may have -- I don't know if I'm giving you too much here, but this is basically the origin of this case.
So over the course of 2014, most of what I did was looking at this Russian organized crime figure, looking at, you know, all the events around the extortion case in Russia, and had to try to help them to figure out how all this information somehow made its way into a Justice Department civil forfeiture complaint.
And eventually, that led us to Mr. Browder, who is a former American citizen, who gave up his citizenship and moved -- when he started making a lot of money in Russia, and was living in the UK. And he didn't want to explain any of this to us.
We originally wrote him a letter. The lawyers wrote him a letter saying, can you tell us what's going on here, and he declined. And so then the lawyers asked
UNCLASSIFIED, COMMITTEE SENSITIVE
