After the news came out, on Tuesday, that Columbus Nova, an American company linked to the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, gave Michael Cohen, President Trump’s lawyer, a half million dollars last year, a lawyer for the company issued a statement that said, “Columbus Nova is a management company solely owned and controlled by Americans. . . . Neither Viktor Vekselberg nor anyone else other than Columbus Nova’s owners, were involved in the decision to hire Cohen or provided funding for his engagement.” So who are these owners? I happened to have a phone number for Reinhard Freimuth, a managing director at Columbus Nova’s financial-management arm, so I called him up to ask. Who owns Columbus Nova? “I haven’t got a clue,” Freimuth said. He pointed me to the lawyer’s statement.

The fact is that Columbus Nova’s lawyer is using the phrase “owned and controlled” to mean something more narrow and technical than what we normally think of as ownership and control. “Think about us as his property manager,” Freimuth said. “Like a family office.” Viktor Vekselberg, the founder of a company called the Renova Group, is one of Russia’s richest men, with a multibillion-dollar fortune made in the oil and metal industries. It has become common for very rich people to have something called a family office, essentially a company tasked with managing and investing their money. Columbus Nova, which is based in New York City, functions in a similar way for Vekselberg. It is a company technically owned by others but which looks after money owned and controlled in large part—if not entirely—by Vekselberg and his family. (Columbus Nova’s president, Andrew Intrater, is Vekselberg’s cousin.) It’s the kind of clever corporate structure that allows a lawyer, at a crisis moment such as this, to say truthfully that the company is not owned and controlled by the man who owns and controls everything of value within the firm. (Columbus Nova’s lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.)

In another statement issued in response to the Michael Cohen news, Columbus Nova claimed that it hired Cohen as “a business consultant regarding potential sources of capital and potential investments in real estate and other ventures.” This is laughable. Columbus Nova has access to billions of dollars of its main client’s money, and has no need to find new potential sources of capital. If it did, Cohen is not the kind of person it would be likely to contact. Cohen’s long-term business connections, apart from the President of the United States, are mostly avid taxicab investors—not the sort that would appeal to a firm like Columbus Nova.

Cohen does have some real-estate experience: he oversaw several Trump Organization building projects, including failed ones in Kazakhstan, the Republic of Georgia, and Moscow. Like most Trump projects, these were considered to be of non-institutional quality, meaning that they were too small and didn’t meet due-diligence thresholds and other requirements needed to receive support from pension funds or other major investment sources. Columbus Nova operates at a far higher level of real-estate investment. It manages or has major investments in several global, institutional-quality real-estate-portfolio companies. Their reaching out to Cohen for real-estate advice would be like McDonald’s calling the proprietor of a local diner and asking how to run a restaurant.

The Trump Administration has inspired a national crash course in a host of legal issues. We are all learning a great deal about the formal and informal rules governing the Presidency, the relationship between the White House and the Department of Justice, the emoluments clause of the Constitution, and the political and legal constraints of impeachment. Many of us have also become far more acquainted with the ins and outs of money laundering and the anti-bribery Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. We might now be entering the section of the course called “Legal Entities: How to Hide Everything You Do Behind Shell Companies.”

We still don’t know how Michael Avenatti, the lawyer representing Stephanie Clifford, the adult-film actress and director known as Stormy Daniels, uncovered the information about payments that Cohen received from Columbus Nova—and also from A.T. & T., Novartis, and others. (In response to a request for comment for this article, Avenatti said, “Like any good journalist I don’t disclose my sources. There are numerous pieces of evidence that have yet to be made public.”) What we can say is that Trump—and the people who work for and with him—still have the ability to shock and, in an instant, expand our understanding of what is possible. This week has been especially revealing. On Saturday, the Washington Post reported that, in 2006, Trump, rather abruptly, shifted to a strategy of paying for real-estate deals in full, rather than borrowing money. In some cases this makes some sense. He bought several underperforming golf courses on the cheap, put in some money, and dramatically improved their value. But in other cases the strategy makes no sense at all. Trump claims to have spent more than two hundred million dollars on two golf businesses in Scotland, which have been losing money steadily and show little likelihood of appreciating in value. It is simply nonsensical that Trump would place all of his available cash in money-losing businesses without sharing the risk with investors.

We don’t know what he actually spent in Scotland (or anywhere), because the money flowed between private, Trump-owned companies, which are not required to reveal much information. Donald Trump, according to his published financial disclosure, owns five hundred and sixty-five different companies, each of which is a black box. We can’t see what is inside them. And, as the case of Columbus Nova demonstrates, it is possible that there are other companies that Trump doesn’t technically own but that manage nothing but Trump assets, or which otherwise serve as entities designed to transfer his funds.

In normal times, with normal businesspeople, the existence of a network of shell companies isn’t necessarily evidence of wrongdoing. Many people, and most large companies, have control of multiple legal entities, such as L.L.C.s. (I, myself, am a co-owner of three different, tiny L.L.C.s, all created to handle different aspects of my journalism work.)

However, this week of shocking revelations has made clear that it would be irresponsible for journalists and investigative authorities to give the Trump Organization and its associates such a generous benefit of the doubt. National security and faith in our government requires us to know much, much more than we do about Trump’s hundreds of legal entities, and how money flowed into, between, and out of them. It is certainly possible that we will learn there is no evidence of illegality at the Trump Organization. Perhaps there are innocent explanations of his behavior and that of the people closest to him. At this point, though, that would be the most shocking news of all.