It is by now indisputable that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the White House—and new reports prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee suggest the Kremlin continued its meddling efforts to help keep him there. According to the reports, released by Senate investigators Monday, Moscow in 2017 mounted a disinformation campaign targeting Robert Mueller, seeking to portray him as corrupt and linked to “radical Islamic groups,” in an effort to discredit the special counsel investigating the president’s campaign connections to Russia.

It’s not clear how successful the social-media smear campaign was—Mueller continues to boast higher public-approval ratings than the president—but the effort again underscores Russia’s interest in aiding Trump politically.

Trump has spent the better part of two years now arguing not only that he didn’t collude with Russia in 2016, but that the Kremlin wouldn’t have meddled in the election on his behalf, because it didn’t want him to win the presidency. “I have been Russia’s worst nightmare,” Trump claimed this past June. “If Hillary got in, I’d think Putin is probably going, ‘Man, I wish Hillary won.’ Because you see what I do.” But the United States intelligence community disagrees, and Russian President Vladimir Putin himself has said explicitly that he’d wanted Trump to defeat Clinton.

This isn’t the only line of attack against Mueller. Back in October, then-20-year-old Trump fanboy Jacob Wohl and Republican conspiracy peddler Jack Burkman attempted to smear the special counsel with false sexual misconduct allegations. That confusing effort was quickly—and somewhat hilariously—revealed to be a hoax. But of course, the most prominent line of attack against Mueller remains Trump himself, who has somehow ramped up his social-media onslaught against the special counsel as investigators close in and his legal strategy falters. His barrage against Mueller has, like the Russian smear campaign, sought to portray the special counsel as corrupt, with the president earlier this month tweeting that the former F.B.I. head is “a much different man than people think.” He and his legal team are supposedly preparing a counter-report to the one Mueller and his investigators are expected to release soon.