Ever since Rudy Giuliani decided to torch his legacy by gallivanting across Europe in search of potential “dirt” on former Vice President Joe Biden, the repercussions have been as swift as they’ve been mind-boggling.

Through the former New York City mayor’s enabling, Donald Trump has become the first president in American history to pressure a foreign government to investigate a political rival—tossing open the floodgates for foreign operators to stick their paws in America’s upcoming presidential election. And there’s a world of heinous governments and criminal networks more than willing to take Giuliani and Donald Trump up on their global smear efforts—whether Trump’s ultimate opponent is Biden or someone else.

The ramifications are stupefying. Whatever antediluvian assurances Americans had about the sanctity of their elections, at least as pertained to keeping foreign hands off the vote, are gravely endangered, if not gone, displaced by the grotesquery of Trump’s willingness to do whatever it takes to remain in power. Against this calamity, Democrats had a moral obligation to attempt Trump’s impeachment, without regard for whether or not they would succeed.

It’s not just governments like those in Moscow or Beijing that are willing to cater to Trump’s autocratic whims. The recent example out of Ukraine, for instance, doesn’t necessarily place the Ukrainian government at the heart of the anti-Biden efforts that have brought us to the brink of impeachment. Rather, the canker at the center of the anti-Biden campaign appears to be a crooked Ukrainian oligarch named Dmytro Firtash.

Stuck in Vienna and awaiting extradition to the United States, Firtash—who has an outspoken grudge against Biden—just happens to be connected to every member of Giuliani’s grubby network rooting around for anti-Biden dirt. Not only has Firtash, whom the Justice Department described as an “upper-echelon [associate] of Russian organized crime,” hired Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova, a pair of pro-Trump conspiracy theorists, to plead his case in Washington, but he also shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire Giuliani’s post-Soviet bagman, Lev Parnas, as a supposed “translator.” All of those in Firtash’s pay have also happened to be the main tip of Giuliani’s efforts to smuggle anti-Biden conspiracies out of Ukraine and onto Fox News—and directly into the White House.