Nearly two decades ago, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the then doughy dictator of Kazakhstan, came hat in hand to the George W. Bush White House, desperate to make a deal. The post-Soviet strongman had a problem: The Department of Justice had accused Nazarbayev of gob-smacking bribery. Per the DOJ, the Kazakh leader had put the squeeze on a range of hydrocarbon companies, hoping to tap the country’s vast oil wealth. Those companies reciprocated by funneling tens of million of dollars to Kazakhstan’s kleptocrat in chief. All run through Swiss bank accounts, the ill-gotten gains provided Nazarbayev with luxe creature comforts such as snowmobiles, fur coats, and speedboats. Caught red-handed, Nazarbayev needed President Bush and his staff to help make his judicial issues go away.

Those allegations resulted, at the time, in the largest case ever brought under the auspices of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the keystone in the United States’ anti-corruption regime. The charges were also a thumping embarrassment for Nazarbayev, who had sought to spin his image as a democratizing, West-leaning figure. (Among those Nazarbayev roped into his whitewashing efforts: Tony Blair.) Nazarbayev leaned on the Republicans in the White House to try to make the allegations disappear. As one analyst wrote, Nazarbayev “so dreaded being tarnished” by a conviction “that both he and his envoys pleaded repeatedly for the George W. Bush Administration to order the case be dropped.” He sicced his underlings on Dick Cheney, who dodged Nazarbayev’s efforts. (According to the Financial Times, Cheney “rebuffed” the Kazakhs, “recommending in essence that they hire a good lawyer.”) Nazarbayev then turned directly to Bush himself—but, as The New York Times reported, the dictator’s henchmen were “told there was nothing the administration could do about the investigation.”

And that was that. A Republican administration had sent a post-Soviet kleptocrat packing, allowing a DOJ investigation to continue humming along unperturbed. Nazarbayev continued to sweat as further details of his financial malfeasance came to light. The case itself eventually fell apart, for a range of disparate reasons. Nevertheless, the revelations helped inspire lawmakers to eventually draft pioneering regulations requiring hydrocarbon companies to disclose their payments to foreign governments. The entire episode also highlighted how an executive branch could, and should, push back against foreign crooks trying to quash American investigations.

But those days are gone. The past few months, which have culminated in the third impeachment of a U.S. president, have demonstrated that President Donald Trump and his ideological allies have no intention of following in Bush’s footsteps by rejecting foreign corruption. While Trump insists that his unprecedented pressure campaign in Ukraine was an effort to fight foreign graft, he and his allies have taken a sledgehammer to the very anti-corruption regulations assembled to ensure that a repeat of the “Kazakhgate” affair never happens. And if you think that being under the white-hot spotlight of impeachment has chastened the president, think again: The Trump administration’s latest effort to undermine the global effort against kleptocracy happened right before the holiday season kicked off, in the height of impeachment fervor.

Amid the daily deluge of news about Trump’s various scandals, it can be difficult to appreciate the lengths to which this administration and its congressional allies have gone in their attempts to decimate America’s preeminence in global anti-corruption measures. (For a comprehensive rundown, see here.) Trump’s bids to implode the U.S. anti-corruption efforts go back to the earliest days of his presidency, when, in one of his first official acts, he and his House GOP allies employed a “rarely used” mechanism to prevent the implementation of a regulation mandating that major oil and gas companies disclose their payments to foreign governments.