The White House has a Russia problem, and over the past few months, staffers have been lawyering up to protect themselves. Robert Mueller is looking at several Trump associates in particular: Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, and the president’s son Donald Trump Jr., are all reportedly central players given their past connections with Kremlin operatives. But practically everyone in the West Wing who had extensive interactions with those principals is a potential witness, too, forcing Hope Hicks, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, Mike Pence, and Michael Caputo, among others, to retain counsel, too. As my colleague Abby Tracy reported in June, those lawyers are expensive, and not everyone is the scion of a billionaire with direct access to their presidential campaign’s funds, like Kushner or Trump Jr. For many members of Donald Trump’s staff, the $750 to $1,000 per hour cost of a top-tier attorney is either out of reach or a recipe for bankruptcy. (One expert noted that even for an individual facing a single interview with the F.B.I., a lawyer could easily devote 40 to 60 hours to their case, resulting in bill for anywhere from $30,000 to $60,000.) And so this week, with Trump staffers staring down the barrel of Mueller’s investigation, the White House opened the floodgates to outside money for penurious aides and advisers, eliminating the transparency requirement for their legal defense funds entirely.

Politico reports that the U.S. Office of Government Ethics has, with little fanfare, reversed an internal rule preventing White House staffers from accepting anonymous donations to help pay for their legal bills. Under this new status, government employees under investigation can solicit and accept money from parties normally prohibited from donating money to them—such as lobbyists, interest groups, and the broad category of “people with business before the government”—as long as their identities are unknown. “You can picture a whole army of people with business before the government willing to step in here and make [the debt] go away,” Marylin Glynn, a former acting director of the O.G.E., told Politico.

O.G.E. guidelines technically allow for this to occur, thanks to a 1993 guidance document implemented while Bill Clinton and his staff were being investigated during the Whitewater scandal. At the time, the Office determined that it could technically be legally acceptable, because there could be no conflicts of interests if the donor was unknown. But upon further consideration, the Office advised White House staffers to refuse anonymous donations. “It wasn’t in the interest of the public to have people guessing who really is donating here,” said Glynn.

The 1993 document, however, remained unchanged until May 2017, when then director Walter Shaub added a line at the top stating that the opinion was “NOT CONSISTENT WITH CURRENT OGE INTERPRETATION AND PRACTICE.” He insisted that his action was not motivated by politics—both candidates in 2016, after all, had suspicious ties to large financial institutions—but after he left in July, the document had been updated to include some wiggle room, stating at the top that the guidance “HAS NOT CHANGED” and may only apply to employees with “VERY FACT-SPECIFIC” cases. “It’s very depressing,” Shaub told Politico. “It’s unseemly for the ethics office to be doing something sneaky like that.” The Trump White House disputed that characterization, and said that Shaub was only “trying to make himself feel relevant.” (The Hive has reached out to both the White House and Shaub for comment.)

Regardless of their legality, anonymous donations to White House legal defense funds have always aroused suspicion: Richard Nixon was scrutinized for his actions in setting up a fund for his staffers during Watergate, and the Clintons themselves had relied on such a fund to defend themselves during the Whitewater and Paula Jones scandals. At the very least, after the president spent the entire campaign hammering the Clintons for their alleged corruption, the Trump administration may want to avoid aping the Clintons.