Yesterday, Donald Trump took to a podium and, his voice cut with pride and self-pity announced: “No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly.” As he spoke to the assembled crowd at the Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut, Washington was steeling itself for the next onslaught in a sustained, eight-day shelling of scandal. It began with Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey, and pirouetted neatly round, just days later, to reveal that the president reportedly asked Comey to drop an investigation into Michael Flynn’s ties with Russia. Right on cue, the next installment came promptly, in the form of a New York Times report, which claimed the Trump administration installed Flynn as national security advisor despite being aware that he was under F.B.I. investigation for undisclosed lobbying on behalf of the Turkish government. The White House, presumably too busy churning out a series of statements refuting other interlinked stories, declined to comment.

Citing two sources, the Times claims that, on January 4, Flynn informed White House counsel Don McGahn that the F.B.I. was investigating his ties with Inovo BV, a Dutch company owned by Ekim Alptekin, chairman of the Turkish-American Business council. An extrusive Trump supporter, who spoke at the Republican National Convention in July, Flynn signed a $600,000 contract in August, and was hired to run a 90-day long smear campaign against Fethullah Gulen, a U.S.-based cleric whom the increasingly authoritarian Turkish President Recep Erdoğan has accused of orchestrating a failed coup last summer. When signing the contract, Flynn failed to register as a foreign agent, which, when an American represents the interest of a foreign government, is required by U.S. law.

On November 8—the same day Trump was elected—Flynn published an op-ed in The Hill, championing improved relations between Turkey and America, and describing Gulen as a “shady Islamic Mullah.” The article spiked a series of eyebrows, and prompted the Justice Department to inform Flynn that it was looking into his lobbying. Flynn’s camp reportedly told the Trump administration of this on two separate occasions.

As McClatchy reported Wednesday night, one of the first decisions Flynn made as national security advisor, 10 days before Trump was inaugurated, was to shelve a long-planned military operation in Syria, which aimed for Kurdish fighters to conquer the ISIS-held city of Raqqa. Turkey, who views the Kurds as as adversaries, opposed the plan. After Flynn was fired, it was re-instated.

According to McClatchy, some members of Congress have used the word “treason” to describe Flynn’s intervention while he was on Turkey’s payroll.