Read: Decades of dirty tricks finally catch up to Roger Stone

Jones’s empire may be the best example of how conspiracy theories and fringe politics can make for a profitable business. In 2013, Alex Seitz-Wald estimated in Salon that Jones was pulling in roughly $10 million a year from advertising across his various Infowars platforms—web, radio, and paid subscribers. Over the past few years, Jones appears to have switched to a similarly lucrative business model built on hawking dietary supplements, what one former Infowars employee described to BuzzFeed News as “QVC for conspiracy.”

Corsi no longer works for the publication, due to an opaque dispute from some time in 2018, and is currently suing Stone for defamation, largely on the basis of Stone’s Infowars appearances. But the Infowars store still sells both Corsi’s and Stone’s books, and Stone remains one of Jones’s correspondents. His first interview after his arrest was with Jones. “America is under attack,” he declared over a sputtering phone connection, before requesting that listeners donate to his legal-defense fund. He later appeared at an Infowars press conference in front of placards promoting stonedefensefund.com, which warns that Stone’s “legal fees in this epic fight could top $2 million.”

The connections between Jones, Stone, Corsi, and the president are well documented. Trump appeared on Jones’s show during the 2016 election, declaring, “I will not let you down.” In 2011, he spoke with Corsi regarding President Obama’s birth certificate, Mother Jones reported. While the extent to which Corsi and Jones remain in touch with Trump is unclear, they don’t have to be communicating personally in order to influence the president. As Warzel writes, the “conservative media food chain … frequently aggregates and propagates Infowars stories.” A study from the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University refers to this as an “attention backbone,” through which material from Infowars and other fringe outlets travels through outlets such as The Daily Caller and Breitbart News to end up on Fox News. Corsi’s and Stone’s complaints about mistreatment by Mueller’s team—originally aired, in Stone’s case, on Infowars—were both picked up by Fox. If there is good business in misinformation, in other words, there is also good business in laundering that misinformation into quasi-respectable shape for the consumption of viewers, including the president.

George Papadopoulos, once derided by Trump as a “coffee boy,” appears to understand this. He has appeared on Infowars, and the site has continued to champion him as he has popped up on Fox and on the podcast of the pro-Trump pundit Dan Bongino—who himself recently secured a paid position as a Fox contributor. Papadopoulos kept quiet at first following his guilty plea, but began dropping ominous hints on Twitter in the months before and after his sentencing that he had been the victim of a conspiracy to bring down the president. He has a book coming out in March along those lines, with the evocative title Deep State Target. He is filming a documentary about his plans to run for Congress and his wife’s modeling ambitions. Most recently, he announced on Twitter that he had joined the board of a medical-marijuana start-up, netting the previously obscure company a spurt of news coverage. The Chicago Sun-Times writes that the start-up’s founder “is now using Papadopoulos to gain access to the Trump administration, and ... he hopes the connection will help him secure an appointment to the president’s opioid commission.”