The news cycle is such that last week’s big news has already dropped out of sight. I’m talking about the public release of the transcript of a Senate committee interview with Glenn Simpson, whose company commissioned the research that resulted in the so-called Trump Dossier.

There’s was plenty of news coverage of the main takeaways about Trump from the interview. Just search for “glenn simpson transcript” and you’ll come up with a long list of news stories.

By the time I waded through the 300+ pages of the transcript, I found myself focusing on Simpson’s background as a reporter and his description of his personal and professional approach to research. Why? Because, at least as he described himself, it’s the same approach that I have taken to building out a significant investigation.

Simpson described his background:

I have a degree in journalism from George Washington University and I’ve spent most of my working adult life as a journalist, much of it as an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Prior to that I worked as an investigative reporter at Roll Call Newspaper writing about political corruption, financial crime, terrorism, tax evasion, stock fraud,financial scandals, congressional investigations,
government prosecutions, money laundering, organized crime.

I’ve always described myself as a document-based reporter. Simpson described himself as “a document hound”.

Public information is our specialty. We generally are all ex-journalists and specific type of journalists, investigative reporters, and, you know, being a journalist is all about finding public information. At least, you know, the kind of journalism I practiced was based on documents. I’m a document hound and so are my colleagues.

So essentially we gather up large quantities of public information and we process that.

And that was how they approached their research on Donald Trump.

It was, broadly speaking, a kind of holistic examination of Donald Trump’s business record and his associations, his bankruptcies, his suppliers, you know, offshore or third-world suppliers of products that he was selling. You know, it evolved somewhat quickly into issues of his relationships to organized crime figures but, you know, really the gamut of Donald Trump.

What we generally do at the beginning of a case if it’s possible is to order all the books about the subject from Amazon so we’re not reinventing the wheel and we know what’s been written and said before. So this was typical. We ordered every Donald Trump book and, to my surprise, that’s a lot of books. I was never very interested in Donald Trump. He was not a serious political figure that I’d ever had any exposure to. He’s a New York figure really.

So anyway, we read everything we could read about Donald Trump. Those books cover his divorces, his casinos, his early years dealings with labor unions and mafia figures. I’m trying to think what else. His taxes certainly have always been a big issue. Again, it was sort of an unlimited look at his — you know, his business and finances and that sort of thing.

Simpson said he doesn’t let clients tell him how to approach a subject, because he relies on his own curiosity to push an investigation forward.

“The way our firm runs we pursue things, you know, somewhat out of curiosity,” Simpson said.

So we did things like we looked at the golf courses and whether they actually ever made any money and how much debt they had. We looked at the bankruptcies, how could somebody go through so many bankruptcies, you know, and still have a billion dollars in personal assets. So those are the kinds of things. We looked at a lot of things like his tax bills. Tax bills are useful because you can figure out how much money someone is making or how much they’re worth or how much their properties are worth based on how much they have to pay in taxes….

So in the early phases of something you’re collecting lots of paper on every subject imaginable. So in the course of reading that litigation we would follow up on things that were interesting, such as a libel case against a journalist that he settled, which, in other words, he didn’t prevail in his attempts to prove that he was a billionaire.

This is the hard work that needs to be done as an investigative reporter. What Simpson describes here is more thorough than would typically be done on a local issue, but I usually take a lot of time to collect and review public record information about a situation, company, or person that I hope to write about. And the time required is really what makes investigative reporting a rare commodity today.

Few reporters have the luxury to dive into the deep end of the public document pool while developing a story. I’m lucky to have had that opportunity several times in my journalistic career.