word you used?
MR. SIMPSON: I don't remember the exact words, but it had fallen into disrepair.
MS. SPEIER: So, it was purchased by Mr. Trump for $41 million and sold to Mr. Rybolovlev for $95 million. And since there had been few improvements made by then-developer Mr. Trump, what is your opinion, I guess, as to why that big hike in the sale price?
MR. SIMPSON: Well, I originally dismissed this transaction as a runoff, or not relevant, because of my imperfect and incomplete understanding of the whole timeline. And I had never heard of Dmitry Rybolovlev. So it seemed like an absurd acquisition. But the explanation for why he overspent was that he was hiding money from his wife. And the depiction of him as a sort of reckless big spender was pretty thoroughly developed in the press.
So, I mean this guy was spending money like a drunken sailor on all kinds of things, and people were ripping him off in art deals. So that was my original take on this. Also, when we first heard about it, it didn't fit with my timeline of when Trump seemed to have gotten deeply involved with the Russians.
Later, as I understood more, I began to realize that it actually was in the sort of first trimester of the Trump-Russia relationship, in that it actually fit in pretty well with some of the early things that had happened. I also began to learn more about Dmitry Rybolovlev. And that changed my view.
In particular, I didn't know in the early period that he was closely linked to Igor Sechin, and that, in fact, he was accused of essentially destroying an entire city environmentally with his potash mining operations, and was criminally accused, and managed to get out of it and walk out of Russia with billions of
UNCLASSIFIED, COMMITTEE SENSITIVE
