This week, we got yet another indication that the President has tried to intervene in and change the outcome of the federal investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. The New York Times reported that last year, while the special counsel’s team was building its case against Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort, then-Trump attorney John Dowd reached out to both men with promises of a presidential pardon. The timing suggests Trump’s team was trying to influence their decision on how to plead.

Following Dowd’s exit, Trump’s legal team remains ensnared in chaos. The President has reached out to a number of big-name D.C. attorneys to try to fill the void created by Dowd’s departure, but they’ve turned him down either because they’re uninterested in retaining such an unmanageable client or because they have conflicts of interest.

Without new additions to Trump’s legal team, Andrew Ekomonou has been elevated to a lead role. In addition to his legal work, Ekomonou is a medieval historian who, Josh Marshall reported, built his practice by seizing assets from mini-marts and now mostly works on murder prosecutions on contract for a Georgia district attorney.

Meanwhile, Bob Mueller appears to be drilling into some key events from the 2016 campaign. In a court filing this week, he alleged that cooperating Trump associate Rick Gates knowingly communicated with a former Russian intelligence officer while he was working for the Trump campaign. Mueller has also been questioning witnesses, including Carter Page, about Russia-related events at that year’s Republican National Convention, including then-Sen. Jeff Sessions’ meeting with Russia’s then-ambassador to the U.S. and changes to the GOP platform to soften language supporting Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s military intervention in that country.

Also this week, Sessions announced he is turning down congressional Republicans’ request for a second special counsel to probe alleged anti-Trump bias among the agents handling the FBI’s Russia probe.

Meanwhile, Cambridge Analytica, the Trump campaign’s data firm, has remained in the headlines, keeping the pressure on Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly planning to testify before Congress about the company’s privacy practices following reports that Cambridge Analytica improperly used the social media giant’s data to try to influence elections.

The NRA acknowledged for the first time this week that it accepts donations from foreign entities — including one from Russian banker and reported FBI target Aleksandr Torshin. It claims to never have received foreign money in connection with a U.S. election.

And a simmering diplomatic crisis continues. Two dozen countries, including the U.S., expelled Russian diplomats this week in a show of solidarity with Britain, where an ex-Russian spy and his daughter were recently poisoned. Russia said it would retaliate by ousting an equivalent number of diplomats from each of those nations.