At first glance it might seem as if Parnas and Fruman were just doing Giuliani’s bidding when, in 2019, they started pushing the same disinformation. But Giuliani wasn’t paying them — they were paying Giuliani. Parnas, in turn, was being paid by Firtash, who is, according to the Justice Department, an “upper echelon” associate of Russian organized crime. Firtash is also close to the Kremlin; a Ukrainian official once described him as “representing Russia’s interests in Ukraine.”

Firtash, who made his fortune as a middleman in Ukraine’s natural gas industry, is stuck in Vienna, fighting extradition to the United States for trial on bribery and racketeering charges. Last month, when Parnas and Fruman were arrested while attempting to leave the United States on one-way tickets, Vienna was their destination.

On Friday, CNN reported that Parnas boasted of the “luxurious lifestyle” Firtash bankrolled. “Beginning in mid-August, this included around-the-clock bodyguards, two luxury S.U.V.s for his entourage, and at least six private charter flights in the past several months,” CNN said. It’s hard to imagine what Firtash would have been paying for besides access to Trump.

It was reportedly Firtash’s lawyers who first obtained an affidavit from the fired Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin claiming, falsely, that Joe Biden had targeted Shokin for investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company that had Hunter Biden on its board. Giuliani would later wave this affidavit around on cable television as proof of his claims against Joe Biden.

Firtash’s motives aren’t hard to grasp. As he fights extradition, he has obvious reasons to want to ingratiate himself with Trump. It was in his interest to see the former ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, fired, because her work against corruption — particularly her support for the reform-minded chief executive of Naftogaz, Ukraine’s national gas company — threatened his business interests. And by helping to spread damaging conspiracy theories about Ukraine, he aided his allies in the Kremlin. “It serves the interest of Russian intelligence to cause further consternation and confusion by pointing the finger at Ukraine rather than Russia for the 2016 successful disinformation campaign,” said McCallion.

In court last month, a lawyer for Parnas said that some evidence against him could be subject to executive privilege, apparently because his work with Giuliani overlapped with Giuliani’s work for Trump. If that’s true, then Firtash is directly linked to America’s president. The two men may have used each other, but there’s no reason to believe that Trump was the one in control. There was a time when Republicans would be mortified by an American president being manipulated by a figure like Firtash. Lucky for them, they’ve lost the ability to feel shame.