Parnas and Fruman’s schemes are a little hard to follow. Prosecutors charged them, as well as two other men, with conspiracy, false statements to the Federal Election Commission, and falsifying records. An indictment charges that the men engaged in a straw-donor scheme to illegally donate money to a congressman—former Representative Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican—at the behest of a Ukrainian official, to get help in trying to have the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine fired. (Sessions wrote a letter calling for the diplomat’s firing, and she was eventually removed.) In another scheme, they funneled money from a Russian foreign national, again in violation of the law, into donations, using a legal recreational-marijuana enterprise as a front.

“Protecting the integrity of elections, and protecting our elections from unlawful foreign influence, are core functions of our campaign-finance laws,” Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a press conference on Thursday.

This is not the first time attention has turned to Parnas and Fruman. The men were already reported to have been assisting Giuliani in his quest to dig up dirt on dealings in Ukraine by former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. (No evidence of wrongdoing has yet turned up.) BuzzFeed reported on the men’s lavish spending during that investigation. Parnas told BuzzFeed he’d met with the president “many times” but wouldn’t say what they discussed. The men seem to have been small-time businessmen with little political experience until recently, and how they got involved or what they were seeking is still not clear.

Read: Trump’s game of chicken

The fact that Trump’s corruption-seekers were, themselves, allegedly corrupt begs a comparison to Richard Nixon’s crew of Plumbers, who were convened to investigate leaks of classified information but were eventually arrested for crimes of their own. The White House has argued that the Democratic impeachment inquiry is illegitimate because Trump did nothing wrong and there’s nothing to investigate, but each new piece of information—much less federal indictments—makes that argument harder to sustain.

Even before the arrests, there was evidence that the public wasn’t buying it. A Fox News poll released Wednesday found that an eye-popping 51 percent of Americans want Trump impeached and removed from office. Another 4 percent want him impeached but not removed. The poll shows growing support in practically every group, across ideological and demographic categories. Some are especially worrisome for Trump: Suburban women favor impeachment and removal, 57 to 33. More than half of the respondents think the Trump administration is more corrupt than previous presidencies. Among those who oppose impeachment, only one in five say Trump did nothing wrong.