corruption and organized crime activities sort of making its way westward from Russia, and eventually started doing a lot of work on Ukraine, corruption in Ukraine and gas trade in Ukraine, and connections to the Russian mafia. That's when I first came across Paul Manafort.
And in any event, when I decided to leave the Journal in 2009, I had developed a lot of relationships with people who worked on organized crime issues, Russian organized crime issues, and had become known as someone who specialized in that. And a mutual acquaintance of ours suggested that -- Chris had just left the British Government, and a mutual acquaintance of ours suggested that we might be able to work together or at least, you know, had a lot in common.
And so I don't remember the details, but we were introduced. We met. And, you know, it turned out we did, in fact, have a, you know, kind of obsessive interest in a pretty obscure -- what was then a pretty obscure subject. And, you know, this is 2009, so we've just come off of 8 years of focus in the national security world on al-Qa'ida, Islamic terrorism. And I had spent several years specializing on that.
And so there were very few people at that time who were interested in this issue, and so the small number of us tended to meet at conferences and that sort of thing. So over time, Chris and I would have coffee together when I was in London or he was in Washington, and we would talk about various Russian corruption issues, organized crime, oligarchs.
MR. GOWDY: How did he come to work on this project?
MR. SIMPSON: As I said, I mean, we've done other things together. And over -- well, at the very beginning of this project, one of the very first things that I focused on was Donald Trump's relationship with a convicted racketeer named
UNCLASSIFIED, COMMITTEE SENSITIVE
