Donald Trump's trip to Moscow for the 2013 Miss Universe pageant is reportedly of great interest to Robert Mueller's investigation. At least that's what former aide Sam Nunberg said in a string of unhinged interviews he gave on Monday after getting a subpoena. That trip, after all, is center of the whole alleged pee tape story, and the events around it provide a lot of examples of Trump's strange fixation on developing a personal relationship with Vladimir Putin. For instance, there's this particularly sad-sounding tweet:

Now, the Washington Post has confirmed that Trump so badly wanted Putin to attend the pageant that he sent the Russian president a hand-written invitation, which is now in the hands of Mueller:

Trump’s letter to Putin, which was described by people with knowledge of its contents, shows how interested he was in attracting the personal attention of the Russian president. The real estate magnate, who owned the Miss Universe pageant, wrote the note at a time when he was looking to expand his brand to Russia.

The letter, the first known attempt at direct outreach by Trump to Putin, has been turned over to investigators probing Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign. It is unclear whether Trump’s missive was ever delivered to the Russian president — and if so, whether Putin responded.

In Trump's defense, there's no way he could have predicted that this fixation on the autocratic leader of a country accused of meddling in U.S. elections would look so bad in hindsight. He had no way of knowing at the time that he would go from being a trust fund-backed con man to an elected official expected to pass any kind of legal scrutiny.

His goals were much simpler then. All he wanted was to put his name on gaudy construction projects in Russia and make sure his beauty pageant didn't get "too ethnic."