Matthew Whitaker, the newly named acting Attorney General and the man who now has authority over Robert Mueller and his investigation, wrote, last year, that he believed the special counsel was going too far. In a column for CNN, Whitaker said that “investigating Donald Trump’s finances or his family’s finances falls completely outside of the realm of his 2016 campaign and allegations that the campaign coordinated with the Russian government or anyone else. That goes beyond the scope of the appointment of the special counsel.”

This column, published in August, 2017, came at a time when Trump’s legal team was advocating this very point. The Trump attorney Jay Sekulow told me, that same month, “I want to be really specific. A real-estate deal would be outside the scope of legitimate inquiry.” Since then, this argument has not held up well. In those days, Whitaker, Sekulow, and others argued that there were, essentially, two clearly delineated and entirely separate spheres: the campaign was one and Trump’s businesses were something else altogether. Mueller’s job was to look at events in the campaign, which, they argued, meant that he would have no reason to enter that other sphere containing Trump’s businesses.

Since then, evidence has emerged that Trump personally ran both his businesses and his campaign simultaneously. We know—from audio tape, documentary evidence, and the words of several insiders—that Trump’s business dealings and his campaign were not separable in any meaningful way. They were linked, and any effort to investigate one would, necessarily, require a thorough look at the other.

In July of this year, CNN obtained an audio tape of a phone call between Donald Trump and Michael Cohen, his lawyer at the time of the call. On it, Cohen describes, right before the 2016 election, a scheme to create a secretive shell company in order to hide a hush payment about an affair with the adult-film actress Stormy Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford. Cohen tells Trump, “I’ve spoken to Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up.” Weisselberg is the Trump Organization’s longtime top financial official. The conversation is clear: Weisselberg, who has worked exclusively for the Trump family since graduating from college, in 1970, was seen as an in-house expert on creating secretive companies to hide the flow of money. In this case, the goal was explicit: to make an illegal payment in order to influence the election. (Cohen later pleaded guilty to the crime, and implicated Trump in it.) Weisselberg was granted immunity in Cohen’s case and testified against him.

That same month, the attorney general of New York State sued the Trump Foundation for allegedly acting as an illegal slush fund, masking personal expenditures as tax-exempt charitable contributions. In a deposition, Weisselberg laid out a scheme that likely violated campaign-finance laws and appeared to be tax fraud. Under Trump’s direction, he paid military veterans and other politically sensitive groups in Iowa to help Trump win the primary caucus there. Once again, a Trump business official was likely violating the law in order to help sway the election.

In previous years, Cohen and Weisselberg had also been central players in the Trump Organization’s efforts to make deals with a variety of figures with ties to the Kremlin. These deals included the Trump Tower in Baku, Azerbaijan, which was made with the family of Ziya Mammadov, a former Soviet official with deep connections to powerful figures in Moscow. Cohen, along with his longtime friend Felix Sater, was central to an unsuccessful effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow during the Presidential campaign. Cohen also pursued a series of deals with Timur Kulibayev, the son-in-law of Kazakhstan’s longstanding autocratic ruler. Kulibayev has business ties to Vladimir Putin.

Weisselberg would have been central to a variety of proposed business deals between the Trump Organization and Aras Agalarov, the Moscow-based billionaire with ties to Putin. It was Agalarov’s son, Emin, who called for the Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and eight figures linked either to the Kremlin or to a variety of oligarchs from the former Soviet Union.

Together, the fact pattern is striking. A small group of Trump insiders worked, for many years, to make business connections with the Kremlin. Those same insiders then worked with the campaign to hide secretive and illegal payments to influence the outcome of the election. There is no evidence suggesting that they say their roles were bifurcated. For them, it was all one thing: helping Trump do whatever it was he wanted to do.

It is inconceivable that a thorough investigation of the possibility of Trump and his campaign colluding with Russia would not include an investigation of the very people who were building links between Trump and Russia, and who have been proved to be comfortable engaging in illegal activity to sway the election.

If Whitaker orders Mueller to stay away from Trump’s businesses, it would open up the opportunity for the House and for state attorneys general to continue some veins of his investigation. It will be far messier and more complex. But it does seem likely that we will learn a great deal about the President’s businesses in the coming years, whether he—and his new acting Attorney General—want us to or not.