(h) On Thursday, Trump said, “I don’t know those gentlemen.”

As I said, it’s a tough choice. On human-interest grounds, I’m choosing Option D, but the grip-and-grin picture of Parnas and Trump at the White House is also priceless—as is a picture of him having coffee with Giuliani at the Trump International Hotel in Washington last month. And let’s not forget the shot of Fruman and Parnas having breakfast in Beverly Hills last year with Donald Trump, Jr., and Tommy Hicks, Jr., a friend of Trump, Jr., who was then running America First Action.

But humor and Schadenfreude aside, this is a deadly serious matter. While there is still a good deal of murk surrounding the activities of Fruman and Parnas, we do know that they were two very busy and well-connected fellows. In addition to doing some of Giuliani’s bidding in Ukraine, as he sought to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter, Parnas got hired by a law firm run by two other Trump supporters and frequent Fox News guests, Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing. According to the Wall Street Journal, the law firm “hired Mr. Parnas in July to serve as an interpreter related to their representation of Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch, who was detained in Vienna, in 2014, on corruption charges filed in the U.S.”

Meanwhile, Parnas and Fruman were also representing, and acting at the behest of, at least two Eastern European parties who haven’t yet been identified. The indictment says that their political donations, some of which were routed through shell companies to hide their identities, “were made for the purpose of gaining influence with politicians so as to advance their own personal financial interests and the political interests of Ukrainian government officials, including at least one Ukrainian government official with whom they were working.”

Who was this Ukrainian official, and what did he or she want? That’s one of the things we don’t know yet, but the indictment says that Parnas met with a U.S. congressman, widely believed to be the former Texas Republican congressman Pete Sessions, and sought his “assistance in causing the U.S. Government to remove or recall the then-U.S. ambassador to Ukraine”—Marie Yovanovitch—and these “efforts to remove the Ambassador were conducted, at least in part, at the request of one or more Ukrainian government officials.”

We also know that the other Eastern European who was employing Parnas and Fruman is Russian. The indictment says that some of the donations that Fruman, Parnas, and two other individuals made in 2018 were really funded by a certain “Foreign National-1,” with a view to obtaining licenses for a recreational-marijuana business in certain U.S. states, including Nevada. One of the other conspirators is quoted in the indictment, and he says Foreign National-1’s identity was kept hidden because of “his Russian roots and current political paranoia about it.”

What does all this add up to? Although Parnas and Fruman hardly appear to fit the bill of men of international intrigue, they clearly played significant roles in the Giuliani-inspired effort to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens, get rid of Yovanovitch, and help Donald Trump get reëlected. That means they are potentially important witnesses in the Presidential-impeachment inquiry.

The House Democrats who are investigating Trump will most certainly want to hear what Parnas and Fruman have to say. (At least one House committee has already served a subpoena on them.) And, according to ABC News, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which brought the campaign-finance case against Parnas and Fruman, is also investigating their business relationship with Giuliani. That’s not good news for Rudy or Trump.

On Thursday, a federal judge in Virginia ordered the pair to be held in detention until they secure a bail bond of a million dollars each. Right now, they are being represented by John Dowd, a former lawyer for Trump, which would suggest they aren’t about to turn on their former associates and spill. But, like Michael Cohen, they could always have a change of heart.