On Tuesday, federal prosecutors said in court that Lev Parnas, the Rudy Giuliani associate who has been charged with several federal crimes and is implicated in the Ukraine scandal, had received $1 million from a lawyer for the Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash, who is wanted in the United States on bribery charges. Parnas seems to have been both a client of and aide to Giuliani as he railroaded U.S. policy and conducted an investigation for Trump, designed to aid his reelection.

David A. Graham: William Taylor delivers the smoking gun

Also on Tuesday, Acting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor, one of the star witnesses in the impeachment hearing, told The New York Times that he was leaving his post in early January—the first clear case of an administration official being pushed out after testifying. Moreover, the Daily Beast reported that Trump vetoed a trip by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Ukraine amid the investigation. Pompeo was also reportedly planning to avoid the embassy in Kyiv, an ironic choice, given that the existence of an alternative foreign-policy channel was central to the inquiry.

Meanwhile, Giuliani returned from a trip to Ukraine, where he continues his skulduggery, and briefed the president on what he supposedly found. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham said he would call Giuliani to testify, though he now—probably prudently—seems to be having hesitations. Giuliani also acknowledged to The New Yorker that he pushed for the firing of former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. “I believed that I needed Yovanovitch out of the way,” he said. “She was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody.”

And all of that is just a sampling of a week’s news—and most of it was uncovered not by investigators with subpoena power, but by reporters. Imagine what an exhaustive legal investigation could do!

There are some known unknowns—things that we know we don’t know. Although there is substantial proof that Trump engaged in a scheme to extort Ukraine for investigations into the Biden family in order to assist his reelection campaign, and there’s no longer plausible deniability through claims that Giuliani or government officials were working without his knowledge, the extent of his direct involvement in the scheme remains unclear.

David A. Graham: Trump has successfully gamed the courts on impeachment

We also still don’t have a great sense of the scope and scale of Giuliani’s work. He is working for the president for free, which means he must be getting paid by someone—but it’s not clear by whom. He both employed Parnas and Parnas’s partner Igor Fruman to assist in his investigations and was a business client of theirs. He considered contracts from the Ukrainian government. But Giuliani did not testify, and the range of his work as well as the content of his communications with the president are still unknown.