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BY MS. SAWYER:
23 Q. Mr. Simpson, again, I’m Heather Sawyer, I
24 work as counsel for Senator Feinstein, and I have
25 with me two of my colleagues. I will primarily be
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- asking the questions. They may have some
2 follow-up.
3 We want to make sure we’re clear. So
4 certainly if I ask you a question, anything that’s
5 unclear, let me know and I will clarify it. Again,
6 we appreciate you being here today to answer our
7 questions.
8 You had talked with my colleagues a bit about
9 the work that Fusion GPS does in general and I
10 wanted to ask you some follow-up on that. What
11 would you describe as kind of the key expertise of
12 your firm, Fusion GPS?
13 A. Public information is our specialty. We
14 generally are all ex-journalists and specific type
15 of journalists, investigative reporters, and, you
16 know, being a journalist is all about finding
17 public information. At least, you know, the kind
18 of journalism I practiced was based on documents.
19 I’m a document hound and so are my colleagues.
20 So essentially we gather up large quantities
21 of public information and we process that. We’ve
22 sort of more recently branched into data science
23 and, you know, digital data, obtaining databases
24 through FOIA. We do a lot of Freedom of
25 Information Act work. We work with court records
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1 a lot, corporate records a lot. Some of my
2 employees do a lot of financial crime and money
3 laundering and fraud investigations, tax evasion,
4 that sort of thing. Those are my specialties.
5 I was also a political reporter and covered
6 campaigns and elections. I know a lot about how
7 campaigns work and how, you know, Washington works
8 generally. So we do things like policy disputes,
9 one industry versus another, one company versus
10 another. We don’t do a lot of campaign consulting,
11 but every four years for the last couple of cycles
12 we’ve done some presidential work.
13 Generally speaking, the way our business is
14 structured most campaigns don’t have the budget for
15 the kind of services that we provide. So we only
16 would do things where people have the resources to
17 pay for a serious piece of research. So we do
18 things like a California initiative or
19 presidential.
.