MR. SCHIFF: Thank you.
Mr. Quigley.
MR. QUIGLEY: Good afternoon. Thanks for being here.
Let me give you an opportunity. You said that Mr. Steele was a perfect hire. I think you used you trusted him a lot. Could you elaborate why you thought he was such a perfect hire, why you trusted him so much? I know you said you had talked to him, you had met with him. Did you have to do any other due diligence or what did you know about him and his reputation before?
MR. SIMPSON: Sure. So basically the way the information biz works is, you know, it's a tricky business. A lot of it is about talent spotting, finding people that are reliable, produce reliable information. There's a lot of, I don't know if I'd call it fraud, but there's a lot of BS where people tell you stuff that doesn't turn out to be right.
And so, you know, it's sort of like, again, being a journalist, where you're trying to figure out who your reliable sources are. So the more exotic the topic, the harder it is to find someone who doesn't sell you BS.
And, you know, one of the problems with the business is that basically if you contract with a guy to go find something out or go look into a subject, he doesn't -- he rarely comes back and says: I got nothing for you, I wasn't able to find anything out. They'll just -- if they can't find anything out, they'll just make it up.
So sorry for the long answer. But, anyway, Chris was a reliable provider of information that turned out to be reliable. And so -- so there was all that.
He was also -- he just had a very -- he was -- I think I -- I think I might have said somewhere else that he was a Boy Scout. And, you know, he's just a fairly
UNCLASSIFIED, COMMITTEE SENSITIVE
