It is no longer journalistically sound to report on the Trump investigation as if it is a matter that may, or may not, yield damning information about the President. In a series of filings that came Friday night, the office of the special counsel, Robert Mueller, and a separate group of federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, laid out evidence that, taken together, leaves little doubt that Donald Trump sought to use his candidacy to enrich himself by approving a plan to curry political favor from Vladimir Putin in exchange for a lucrative real-estate opportunity.

It may be only part of the full story, but what we now know is a powerful tale that combines elements that are familiar from other Trumpworld scandals. It is at once shockingly corrupt, blatantly unethical, probably illegal, and yet, at the same time, shabby, small, and ineptly executed.

Combined with another memo released on Friday—a more sparsely informative sentencing memo for Paul Manafort—we are seeing the inner workings of a coördinated conspiracy conducted by people who are very, very bad at conspiracy.

Consider Manafort. In October, 2017, Manafort was indicted, and it was clear to him and anybody who read the news that his communications would be carefully monitored by the F.B.I. Yet this week’s sentencing memo reveals that Manafort was sending text messages and e-mails through May, 2018, that prove he was in contact with “a senior Administration official” and had “additional contacts with Administration officials.” It is surprising that Manafort decided to use text and e-mail for these contacts, since both are easily traced, and it is even more surprising that anybody in the Administration would communicate with Manafort so openly at a time when he was, quite famously, the most toxic political operative in the world. Recklessly, Manafort chose to lie about these contacts to investigators who had already demonstrated their ability to search his e-mail and text history.

Manafort was also in regular communication with his longtime associate Konstantin Kilimnik, a man widely believed to be an asset of Russian intelligence. Once again, he lied about these contacts, even knowing that investigators could easily discover the truth.

In Mueller’s sentencing memo for Cohen, along with court documents from his guilty plea last week, we see a similar combination of illegal or unethical conduct, subsequent lies, and amateurish sloppiness throughout. The documents reveal that, in or before September, 2015, months after Trump announced his run for the Presidency, Cohen and Trump decided to pursue a relationship with Putin and the Russian government. It is now clear that Putin was a receptive audience, hatching his own plans to interfere with the U.S. election to prevent Hillary Clinton’s victory and, over time, to promote Trump’s campaign. Cohen, though, doesn’t appear to know how to hatch a geopolitical conspiracy. He met with one Russian intermediary in November, with whom he discussed “political synergy,” and dropped that person in December in favor of Felix Sater, who proposed a real-estate development project. Sater has been quite open about his strong connections with people tied to Russian intelligence and to the Kremlin.

Then, in early 2016, Cohen sought his own relationships by sending an e-mail to a general press-relations in-box, easily found on government Web sites. E-mail is a notoriously insecure method of communication. E-mails sent from the work address of close advisers of Presidential candidates proposing compromising deals with the leaders of foreign governments are likely to be noticed and read by a variety of intelligence agencies from many nations.

For several months, through June, 2016, Cohen continued to pursue this lucrative opportunity in Moscow while keeping Trump informed. Then, once Trump was President, Cohen, along with unnamed Administration officials, conspired to lie to Congress and the special counsel about matters that were trivially easy to prove. After all, they had left an insecure and easily recovered trail of e-mails, international phone calls, text messages, and conversations with people who proved willing and eager to coöperate with Mueller’s probe and tell-all.

I travelled to Azerbaijan, in late 2016, to report a story. Before I left, I received training in how to communicate securely with people in a country known to have an aggressive intelligence service. I promised not to reveal all of the techniques I was taught, but some are simply obvious and familiar to anybody who does sensitive reporting. There are several encryption-communication tools, such as GPG, Signal, ProtonMail, and others, which make it more difficult for state agencies to read e-mails. I was encouraged to use a variety of phones, including ones not attached to my name in any way. There are the more low-tech methods of, simply, always discussing crucial information in person, insuring there is no recording device, and only talking with well-known and trusted associates who don’t have a history of coöperating with prosecutors. I was taught to assume that no method is foolproof. But many experts believe that it’s possible to get quite close with minimal expense and effort.

The picture revealed in these and earlier filings is of Trump surrounded by a small group of now admitted criminals and others who show little professional accomplishment other than a willingness to do Trump’s bidding. In an almost cruel jab, Robert Khuzami, the acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, points out that Cohen—a lawyer trained in the early nineteen-nineties at one of America’s least respected schools, working out of the back of a taxi-cab garage—made seventy-five thousand dollars a year before he started working with Trump, in 2007. (The average salary of a first-year lawyer in New York City is a hundred and sixty thousand dollars.) Allen Weisselberg, Trump’s longtime accountant and C.F.O., who now runs his company, has already revealed himself to be comfortable with practices that violate easily followed rules of accounting. In the lawsuit against the Trump family’s foundation, Weisselberg has already confessed to practices that are so inept and illegal on their face—such as taking tax deductions for running a foundation that appears not to have existed—as to all but demand prosecution.

Even if we never learn another single fact about Trump, his business and campaign, and any collusion with Russia, it is now becoming clear that Trump’s bid for the Presidency was almost certainly designed, at least in part, to enrich Trump, and that he was willing to pursue the political interests of a hostile foreign power in order to make money. This scheme was executed ineptly and in ways that make it highly likely that the intelligence agencies of Russia, as well as several other nations, have been able to ferret out most of the details. This means that Trump and the people closest to him have been at enormous risk of compromise.

We will learn more facts, no doubt—many of them. Mueller has revealed only a few threads of the case. He has established that Cohen spent the months between September, 2015, and June, 2016, actively engaging the Russian government to exchange political favors for money, and that, throughout this period, Cohen routinely informed Trump of his efforts (and presumably, though it’s unstated, received Trump’s blessing). This was the precise period in which Trump’s candidacy shifted from humorous long shot to the nominee of the Republican Party. Mueller’s filing also contains suggestions that people connected to the White House, possibly including the President, knew of Michael Cohen’s lies to Congress and federal investigators, and, also, that White House officials stayed in contact with Manafort, who had been revealed to be in close touch with a known Russian intelligence asset.