For bad or for worse, Paul Manafort may go down as one of the most consequential lobbyists in American history. It was his ties to the former Soviet Union, after all, that initially fueled accusations that Donald Trump colluded with the Kremlin. Now, caught in Robert Mueller’s dragnet, and facing numerous counts of money laundering, tax fraud, and witness tampering, Manafort will soon stand trial in a case that will likely render judgment on his long career in the dark trenches of K-Street. (He has pleaded not guilty.) On Thursday, the Mueller team submitted more than 500 pieces of evidence to a federal judge intended to show that Trump’s former campaign chairman committed bank and tax fraud, with the purchases (antique rugs, Yankees tickets, in-house putting greens) to prove it. Buried in the list of exhibits, however, is a broader indictment of Washington’s foreign-lobbying culture—one that includes another key figure in the 2016 election: Tad Devine, former chief strategist for Bernie Sanders.

Despite the pearl-clutching across the Internet, both on Twitter and from the likes of the New York Post, it’s highly unlikely that Devine had a hand in any Russian collusion. A top Democratic strategist for Al Gore and John Kerry’s presidential campaigns, Devine worked closely with Manafort in 2010 to elect the pro-Russian Ukraninan president Viktor Yanukovych. He left the team two years later, however, when Yanukovych began to indulge his autocratic impulses, jailing political rival Yulia Tymoshenko. (Manafort, it seems, had no such qualms, continuing to defend his work in Ukraine even after he was placed under house arrest.) It’s far more likely that his appearance in Mueller’s filing is mere context—a footnote in Mueller’s efforts to lay bare the nature of Manafort’s work in Ukraine.

There is, however, a rich backstory behind Devine’s appearance in the filing—one that smells less like collusion than it reeks of the swamp. Though working on international campaigns is de rigueur for political operatives coming off an election, Ukrainian politics held an especially strong interest among D.C. types. In 2009, Politico reported that operatives found Ukraine, a “somewhat surreal Eastern European replay of the 2008 campaign,” to be particularly “lucrative,” with Ukrainians willing to pay top dollar to consult with anyone connected to high-level American politicians. “In the Ukraine and in other post-communist countries, they have this misconception about Washington politics: They think that somehow if you sign up [Democratic messaging firm] AKPD or other former Obama people, you sign up the support of [Barack] Obama,” Taras Kuzio, an academic in Ukraine studies and political consultant, told Politico at the time, adding that generally, post-communists political operatives did not “understand the separation of business and politics.”

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, high-powered political operatives who found themselves drawn to Tymoshenko and Yanukovych remunerative cage match included not only Manafort and Devine, but Democratic super-lobbyist Tony Podesta and Clinton strategist Mark Penn on the pro-Yanukovych side, and Paul Begala and David Axelrod’s firm, AKPD Message and Media, on Tymoshenko’s. Nor did the trend stop after Yanukovych assumed power and began jailing his rivals: a Reuters article from 2013 reported that pro-Yanukovych groups had paid two of their Washington representatives $1.46 million, with $900,000 going to the Podesta Group. “A lot of people are making a lot of money off Ukraine’s political competition,” Bruce Jackson, president of the Project on Transitional Democracies, told Reuters at the time.