On Tuesday, federal prosecutors in New York charged the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya with obstruction of justice, accusing her, essentially, of maintaining a back channel with Russian officials while defending a Russian client in a money-laundering case in New York. This was not a particularly shocking or revelatory turn of events but rather a confirmation of what we’ve known for a long time: that Veselnitskaya blended her work advising an ostensibly private client in with a broader campaign of interest to officials in Moscow, particularly those in the Russian general prosecutor’s office.

Veselnitskaya, of course, is most widely known as the lawyer who met with Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort in Trump Tower, in June, 2016, after a Trump business partner suggested that she could offer documents that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton. But the reason she was in the United States at the time was for hearings in a case launched by the U.S. Attorney’s office in New York against a longtime client of hers, a Russian man named Denis Katsyv.

The details quickly get complicated, but suffice it to say that the investigation against Katsyv was opened in response to a letter filed with prosecutors in New York by Bill Browder, an American-born hedge-fund manager who, in the past decade, has become the chief advocate for sanctions against Russian government officials and other individuals. In 2009, a tax adviser working for Browder, Sergei Magnitsky, testified to Russian investigators that Russian officials had stolen two hundred and thirty million dollars in tax-refund payments. He was arrested and died in pretrial detention, leading Browder to launch a worldwide justice campaign, including lobbying for the passage of U.S. sanctions. In 2012, President Obama signed the Magnitsky Act, which has sanctioned dozens of Russian officials and which became a particular obsession of Vladimir Putin’s.

Another prong of Browder’s efforts was his letter to prosecutors claiming that Katsyv and his investment company, Prevezon, received a portion of the ill-gotten funds and used them to buy millions of dollars’ worth of Manhattan real estate. As I wrote in a piece for this magazine last August, “The Prevezon investigation was of particular interest to those back in Moscow who resented the Magnitsky Act,” which meant that Veselnitskaya, an upward-striving lawyer, found herself with an outsized degree of access in Moscow. “I get the feeling Natalia is a very effective provincial-court operator,” a person close to the Prevezon defense team told me last year. “She’s not that important—but, for a while, the case she was fighting was.”

The indictment unsealed on Tuesday relates to Veselnitskaya’s work on the Prevezon case. In short, the U.S. Attorney’s office alleges that a document that was ostensibly prepared by the office of Russia’s general prosecutor and sent to its counterparts in the U.S. Department of Justice was in fact drafted, or at least edited, by Veselnitskaya herself, who then went on to cite the document as independent proof of her version of events. In this manner, the U.S. Attorney’s office alleges, “Veselnitskaya obstructed the civil proceeding in the Prevezon action then pending in this District.”

In fact, Veselnitskaya’s ties to the office of Yuri Chaika, Russia’s general prosecutor, have been clear for some time. I spoke to Veselnitskaya at length in Moscow, and she tried to downplay her relationship with Chaika and other state prosecutors. But the evidence suggests otherwise. The Times has reported that a memo on Browder and the Magnitsky case that Veselnitskaya brought to Trump Tower resembled—and in some places copied—one distributed by Chaika’s office to a visiting U.S. congressional delegation. For my article, I spoke with someone close to the Prevezon defense team who saw Veselnitskaya on the phone with Chaika a number of times.

On Tuesday, I reached someone who had worked with Veselnitskaya on the Prevezon defense; this person told me that, from the beginning, “It was pretty evident from reading the M.L.A.T.s”—the Russian prosecutors’ documents—“that this was Natalia’s work.” The argumentation was the same, with the alleged evidence closely mirroring what Veselnitskaya was saying in New York. “It wasn’t hard to recognize the origins of the text; it wasn’t particularly concealed,” the former member of the defense team said. Though, the source added, “It may not have been a story of nefariousness but rather sheer incompetence within Chaika’s office. Russia can pull off schemes requiring great sophistication—and it can also be such a ham-fisted, nobody-is-doing-their-jobs sort of place.”

What ultimately is the point of this indictment? Veselnitskaya is unlikely ever to return to the United States. This means that U.S. prosecutors are probably less interested in this particular, narrow matter than in what filing charges allows them to do going forward. “If the government wants on record that Natalia is a Russian government agent, this indictment serves this purpose,” the former member of the Prevezon defense team told me. That is to say, if and when charges are filed in relation to the Trump Tower meeting, prosecutors now have a building block on which to argue that, in her actions in the United States, Veselnitskaya did not represent merely herself and her client but the interests of Russian officials. That should worry Donald Trump, Jr., and Jared Kushner, who attended the meeting with Veselnitskaya, and, in turn, the President himself.