firm that is one of my oldest clients. And I began working for Baker, I believe, in 2009 or ’10, and I've done a number of cases with them. And I generally provide litigation support, which Is research, gathering documents, figuring out who to subpoena, and sometimes dealing with witnesses and media and other things.
I think the Prevezon matter was probably the fourth or fifth matter I've done with them. They're very serious, sober, reputable attorneys, and I like working with them.
And so they approached me originally in late 2013 with this matter. I didn't know anything about Prevezon, didn't know anything. about most of this stuff. Didn't know who Browder was, William Browder was.
But, in any event, the original issue that was presented to me was not really a Russia issue, it was a money -- it was like a technical question about money laundering, which was whether the government could possibly prove that money from some specific fraud in Russia went into these projects in New York, these real estate projects.
And John Moscow, one of the partners there, who's an old contact of mine from when he was a money laundering prosecutor and I was a money laundering reporter, walked me through the technical aspects of the financial transactions.
And to my -- I was skeptical, but he persuaded me that there were some assumptions and leaps in logic that were made about the chain of entities and banks that raised questions about whether they could really prove that this money from over here went to this property over there.
So I was -- so that was -- originally we were retained to help with the technical aspects of it. And I think more broadly as it, you know, became -- I
UNCLASSIFIED, COMMITTEE SENSITIVE
