crime figures that we identified that Donald Trump had relationships with and clearly knew were criminals.
Q When you hired Mr. Steele, did you tell him what to look for in his research?
A No. I -- generally speaking, you know, the challenge is to find qualified, reliable people, and, you know, when I have those people, I tend to not tell them what to do, much like I tend to push back on people who try to tell me what to do.
Q Did you tell Mr. Steele what you expected him to find?
A No.
What I will say is I was quite shocked by what he came back with, and what I -- the general mandate was to look into Donald Trump's business dealings in Russia and to see if he could come up with a little bit more information about who is doing business over there and why, you know, in the course of all these trips he never seemed to be able to consummate a deal. So that was the generalassignment.
Q Did you ever task Mr. Steele with finding certain information related to his business dealings or anything else?
A I think in the latter parts of the project there were things I specifically asked about. The one that comes to mind is Michael Cohen. As I mentioned a little earlier, I didn't understand Michael Cohen to be a significant figure in the Donald Trump world for a long part of this project.
We eventually began to realize that he was a lot more than, you know, the President's sort of pit bull personal attorney and that he was the person who -- I mean, a number of things came up in the course of the year.
UNCLASSIFIED, COMMITTEE SENSITIVE
