MR. SCHIFF: Well, the emails would demonstrate some link.
MR. SIMPSON: Well, right. There was some kind of a -- she represented him or something.
MR. SCHIFF: In the litigation, I think as you have described it, Mr. Browder would have been a hostile witness or a hostile party to Prevezon's interests. Is that fair to say?
MR. SIMPSON: Yes.
MR. SCHIFF: In that respect, the Kremlin's interests would be aligned with Prevezon, not the -- who was the other party?
MR. SIMPSON: The U.S. Justice Department.
MR. SCHIFF: The U.S. Justice Department. So the Kremlin's interests would have been aligned against U.S. Treasury or U.S. Justice Department and with Prevezon.
MR. SIMPSON: Yes. And at the time this case got underway, it seemed pretty obscure. It was a civil money laundering case. But in retrospect, what I think might have happened was that -- so when the case started it wasn't about William Browder. It was about a technical argument about whether you could prove that money from something in Russia went into this real estate development. And so it didn't have a political dimension to me particularly, it was a technical argument. And that is how the case was introduced to me, and the fight was going to be over what the bank records showed.
So it was a reasonably interesting case, but not very potentially controversial. But as we went into discovery, you know, the discovery trail led to Vladimir Putin's biggest critic. And, you know, at that point, because it became sort of a focal point of the case where the allegations came from and whether they
UNCLASSIFIED, COMMITTEE SENSITIVE
