The discovery of an email thread proving the Trump campaign’s eagerness to collude with the Russian government to beat Hillary Clinton has served to underscore what you might call first-order lies that President Donald Trump and his top aides have told over the past year—about meetings with Russians, collusion with Russia, and even, in the past days, about the meeting itself.

But in a way, the most intriguing implication of the email thread—connecting Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort to the subversion campaign—is that it points to a number of under-discussed, second-order lies, which in turn suggest deeper, more nefarious behavior.

It is useful to go back in time and map what we know now onto various key moments in Trump’s campaign and presidency.

After U.S. intelligence agencies concluded with high confidence that the Russian government sponsored the theft and leaking of Democratic Party emails, then-candidate Trump escalated his ongoing feud with the intel community by disputing their conclusions out of hand. At a presidential debate, he said Clinton “has no idea whether it’s Russia, China, or anybody else … and our country has no idea.” He famously said a 400-pound guy in New Jersey might be the culprit.

Now we know that, all along, Kushner, Junior, and Manafort had emails proving Trump wrong, and proving Clinton and the U.S. intelligence community right.