[5:29 p.m.]
MR. SIMPSON: You know, I don't know the entire landscape of oligarchs in Russia, but these guys are obviously not significant oligarchs in Russia. That's what we could tell.
In any event, the first thing that a lawyer wants to know at !he beginning of a case like this, and most cases, is whether their client's story is true. So that was the first thing that we did was we interviewed the client. They interviewed the client and got the client's story.
And the client's story was that these allegations that were in this Justice Department forfeiture complaint originated with an organized crime figure in Moscow, who had been blackmailing them and had been prosecuted, arrested and prosecuted for blackmailing them.
So we had to investigate whether that story was true. So we, you know, spent a long time looking at this guy. His name is Dimitry Barenovsky (ph). And the story that Natalia Veselnitskaya provided to us was that he was a captain in the Solntsevo brotherhood, which is the dominant mafia family in Moscow and known -- you know, it surfaces in parts of the Trump story, bizarrely, and was run by a guy named Semien Mogilevich.
So Natalia is the one telling us the this story because she is the lawyer for Prevezon and had apparently been involved in this extortion matter, and so she's got all the information from the courts about this alleged shakedown. And she was introducing me as some kind of former government lawyer who's the one who hired Baker.
So I worked for Baker, and she's the one who hired Baker. I didn't get to introduced to her originally. This was information she provided to Baker that they
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