MR. SCHIFF: And what was your suspicion that they did come back with? Are you suggesting that what they came back with was not a real estate deal but rather -- or not a real estate deal in Russia but rather Russian money that would be used in Trump properties?
MR. SIMPSON: No, I'm not suggesting that. I mean, you know, there is my state of mind at the time and what I think now or what we eventually began to think. I honestly didn't have any preconceived notions about what was going on. I found it puzzling.
And, I guess, my initial thought was that he, you know -- I mean, the wrap on Donald Trump is he says he's a great businessman, but he's really not a great businessman. And he talks a good game and a lot of it is baloney. And so, you know, I thought -- one of the things I thought was that he wants to do a deal in Russia, but his lawyers won't let him because of the FCPA.
And that every time he gets close to closing a deal in Russia, it gets shot down by his own lawyers because they think he's going to get prosecuted for some sort of corruption offense. And that was my hypothesis, I would say, in the early part of this.
What I later came to believe was that he was, in fact, developing different kinds of business relationships with the Russians than, you know, the sort of marquee thing that he always talked about, which was building a tower in Moscow, and that, in fact, you know, he'd found other ways to profit from his relationship with that.
The Miss Universe contest was a profitable venture for him, and I don't think we have a full accounting of, you know, how much he got paid and where the money came from for putting that on in Russia. But we know that it was -- what
UNCLASSIFIED, COMMITTEE SENSITIVE
