Beginning early last year, a low-level Trump campaign staffer reportedly sent more than a half-dozen requests for senior staffers or the candidate—then on the verge of securing the Republican presidential nomination—to meet with Russian officials. Those attempts concerned more senior members of Trump’s campaign, including Paul Manafort, and Sam Clovis, who cautioned against such overtures. They also underscore the extent of the connections between the Kremlin and Trump’s allies, many of whom have long-standing personal and business ties to Russia.

In March 2016, George Papadopoulos, the youngest member of the campaign’s foreign policy team, sent an e-mail to seven Trump officials with the subject line “Meeting With Russian Leadership—Including Putin” wherein he offered to arrange “a meeting between us and the Russian leadership to discuss U.S.-Russia ties under President Trump,” according to The Washington Post, which was read internal Trump campaign communications.

Papadopoulos’s initial offer to act as an intermediary was rebuffed, according to the Post. “We thought we probably should not go forward with any meeting with the Russians until we have had occasion to sit with our NATO allies,” Clovis, Trump’s campaign co-chairman, wrote in response. Charles Kubic, a retired Navy Rear Admiral and adviser, raised legal concerns, too. “Just want to make sure that no one on the team outruns their headlights and embarrasses the campaign,” Kubic wrote.

Papadopoulos was not deterred, however. Over the course of the next six months, he reportedly sent more than a half-dozen similar proposals to senior members of the Trump campaign. The Trump staffer’s effort included forwarding an invitation from Ivan Timofeev, a senior official at the government-funded Russian International Affairs Council, for Trump to visit Moscow. To which Clovis responded, “There are legal issues we need to mitigate, meeting with foreign officials as a private citizen.” Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager at the time was copied on the e-mail, but the exchange referenced by the Post did not include a response from him to Papadopoulos. After the offer to Lewandowski, Papadopoulos shared the invitation with Manafort, then Trump’s new campaign chairman, who also dismissed the request. “We need someone to communicate that DT is not doing these trips,” he wrote to Rick Gates, another Trump adviser.

In a statement to the Post, a spokesperson for Manafort, Jason Maloni, pointed to the exchanges as evidence that the narrative of Russian collusion is “fake news.” He added that “Mr. Manafort’s swift action reflects the attitude of the campaign—any invitation by Russia, directly or indirectly, would be rejected outright.” Of course, Manafort himself—along with Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner—met with several Kremlin-connected Russians soon after. In July 2016, the three campaign officials invited a Russian lawyer and alleged former spy, along with two interpreters (one of whom had been accused by congressional investigators of participating in a massive international money-laundering scheme) to Trump Tower, under the pretense of coordinating opposition research on Hillary Clinton. Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort, among others, have since become central players in the ongoing Justice Department investigation into Russia’s interference in the presidential election. (All three men, and the Trump campaign, have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.)

More broadly, the e-mail exchanges and Papadopoulos’s reported contact with Russian officials may be indicative of the extent of the Kremlin-backed effort to influence the election last fall. “The bottom line is that there’s no doubt in my mind that the Russian government was casting a wide net when they were looking at the American election,” Steven L. Hall, who managed the C.I.A.’s Russia operations for 30 years until he retired in 2015, said in an interview with the Post. “I think they were doing very basic intelligence work: Who’s out there? Who’s willing to play ball? And how can we use them?”