On Friday, Rick Gates pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States and making false statements. He faced a much longer slate of charges, but agreed to cooperate with Mueller. Gates’s troubles with the truth were so severe that he went to the outlandish length of lying to Mueller during a meeting about a plea deal. (It didn’t work, and ended up producing one of the charges to which he pleaded guilty.) Gates came into the Trump orbit through his mentor and business partner Paul Manafort, who served for a time as Trump campaign chairman, but that shouldn’t cloak his deep involvement in Trump world: He was deputy chairman of the campaign, staying on after Manafort was ousted in August 2016; he served as deputy chair of the Trump inaugural committee; and he helped found America First Policies, an outside support group, remaining there until he was pushed out as his legal troubles increased.

Then there’s Manafort, who Trump decided to place atop his campaign in spring 2016, and who led it through the crucial period of the Republican National Convention. Manafort steadfastly denies any wrongdoing, but a pair of documents from Mueller unsealed last week reveal a brutal array of documentary evidence against him, including technological troubles in producing a doctored profit-and-loss statement and what appears to be a note to his son-in-law instructing him to mislead a bank appraiser.

The White House has distanced itself from Manafort and Gates by pointing out that the crimes with which they are charged occurred outside the auspices of the campaign. This might be convincing if Mueller’s indictments merely sketched out tax fraud—a not-altogether-uncommon private crime. But Mueller alleges that fraud was a core instrument of Davis Manafort, the men’s company. In a new indictment released Friday, Mueller alleges that Manafort worked to create a ring of European leaders who would boost Ukraine’s reputation around the world, while making sure their compensation was invisible.

What was Trump seeking when he brought Manafort on? Presumably, he sought the skills that Manafort and Gates had perfected working for leaders in places like Ukraine—the very business that centered on fraud. (It’s worth noting, once again, the bizarre reality that Manafort offered to work for Trump for free.) And even after he pushed Manafort out, in part because of renewed scrutiny of his past work, Trump kept Gates in his inner circle.

The dishonor roll doesn’t end there. Manafort and Gates seem to have at least been somewhat effective lobbyists, registered or not. Michael Flynn was not so successful. Flynn, having allegedly failed to disclose foreign travel when renewing his security clearance in 2016, entered into a lobbying scheme on behalf of Turkey—though he didn’t file documents acknowledging that until 2017. In the course of that work, Flynn suddenly espoused views of the Turkish government diametrically opposed to what he’d previously said, and, according to former CIA Director and Trump adviser James Woolsey, discussed a plan to kidnap the Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen from exile in the United States and take him to Turkey, where he is accused of fomenting a 2016 coup.