been identified as organized crime figures. Those are the ones that come to mind.
So Mr. Cohen had a very different image for much of the campaign as a -- simply a sort of pugnacious New York lawyer, and we gradually began to see that he was, you know -- people told us he spoke Russian. And his father-in-law is from Ukraine. He seems to have a lot of business dealings over there and, in fact, has a conviction for a money laundering-related crime.
All these things caused a good bit of concern. I guess the big one, the other big one, was the Agalarovs, who seemed to be, you know, the central figures in the Trump-Russia relationship. And so we spent a lot of time looking at them. I, as sort of an amateur student of Russian oligarchs and criminals, I hadn't come across them before. So I thought -- I at first didn't think they were that interesting. But as we've, you know, learned more about them, it's become more troubling.
You know, I now -- I know now that they've been -- the Agalarovs started operating in the United States around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union and are associated with people who are connected to previous episodes of money laundering that are serious, the Bank of New York scandal.
And they themselves -- we found a case in tax court involving the Agalarovs that describes a lot of activity from that period and a criminal investigation of the Agalarovs from that period.
MR. SCHIFF: What period was that?
MR. SIMPSON: Early '90s. And I just know from my reading on this stuff that a lot of agents of influence from Russia came to the United States in that period to launder money, and that, you know, we now know that the Russian
UNCLASSIFIED, COMMITTEE SENSITIVE
