Only in the Trump Administration could the President’s junking of a key nuclear agreement end up as the second-most-talked-about story of the day. That’s what happened on Tuesday. In the afternoon, Donald Trump fulfilled his threat to pull the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal. But most observers ended the day chewing over the revelation that Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen received half a million dollars last year from a firm associated with a Russian oligarch.

The oligarch wasn’t the only one paying Cohen. It was also revealed that Cohen pocketed money from several multinational companies: at least two hundred thousand dollars from A.T. & T., the American telecommunications giant that has been trying to persuade the Trump Administration to approve its merger with Time Warner; four hundred thousand dollars from Novartis, a Swiss pharmaceuticals company whose chief executive reportedly had a group dinner with Trump early this year; and a hundred and fifty thousand dollars from Korea Aerospace Industries, which was seeking a U.S. defense contract.

These payments raise so many questions that it’s hard to keep them all straight. Here’s a list of some of them, together with answers, several of which are tentative.

1. Where did the information about the payments come from?

The primary source was Michael Avenatti, the media-savvy lawyer who is representing Stormy Daniels, the porn actress who received a hush-money payment of a hundred and thirty thousand dollars from Cohen shortly before the 2016 election. On Tuesday afternoon, Avenatti posted a seven-page document online that lists a series of payments made in 2017 and early 2018 to an account at First Republic Bank, the same one that Cohen used to make the payment to Daniels. The account belonged to a company named Essential Consultants, L.L.C., which is controlled by Cohen.

“Chief among these suspicious financial transactions are approximately $500,000 in payments received from Mr. Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian oligarch with an estimated net worth of $13 billion,” Avenatti’s document claims. “Mr. Vekselberg and his cousin Mr. Andrew Intrater routed eight payments to Mr. Cohen through a company called Columbus Nova LLC (‘Columbus’) beginning in January 2017 and continuing until at least August 2017.”

2. Where did Avenatti get this information?

We don’t know for sure. But it seems to have come from original bank records, which are usually only disclosed in court cases. Avenatti’s document listed the exact dates and amounts of the money transfers—the sort of information that banks and individuals usually guard closely. One theory is that Avenatti obtained the information as part of discovery in a California lawsuit in which he, as Daniels’s lawyer, is trying to get a judge to free his client from the nondisclosure agreement that she signed as part of her hush-money settlement with Trump, arranged by Cohen in 2016. Another is that the information was leaked by someone who has access to banking records filed with the Treasury Department.

3. Who is Viktor Vekselberg?

A native of the Ukraine and an engineer by training, Vekselberg is one of the richest men in Russia. Like many of the country’s oligarchs, he made his fortune in the tumultuous years after the collapse of Communism, when he acquired valuable oil and aluminum assets, some of them in Siberia. After Vladimir Putin came to power, he stripped some of the oligarchs of their fortunes, but not Vekselberg, who somehow managed to maintain a cordial relationship with the Kremlin. His company, Renova Group, now has a wide array of holdings. He is certainly not unfamiliar with American politics. According to the Times, his cousin Intrater, who is an American citizen, donated a quarter of a million dollars to the Trump Inauguration committee. Vekselberg attended the Inauguration. Last month, the Trump Administration placed him on a list of Russians subject to economic sanctions because of the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election.

Some years ago, Dmitry Medvedev, who is now Russia’s Prime Minister, appointed Vekselberg as the co-director of an effort to create a Russian version of Silicon Valley in a town near Moscow. He also has connections to the Clinton Foundation: according to the foundation’s Web site, the Renova Group has donated somewhere between fifty thousand and a hundred thousand dollars.

4. What were the payments to Cohen for?

That is the big question. In a tweet, Avenatti initially suggested that “these monies may have reimbursed the $130k payment” to Stormy Daniels.

A lawyer for Intrater and Columbus Nova told the Times that the company hired Cohen as a business consultant, and insisted that Vekselberg had nothing to do with the arrangement or the payments. “Columbus Nova is an investment management company solely owned and controlled by Americans,” Richard Owens, the lawyer, said. “After the inauguration, the firm hired Michael Cohen as a business consultant regarding potential sources of capital and potential investments in real estate and other ventures. . . . Neither Viktor Vekselberg nor anyone else outside of Columbus Nova was involved in the decision to hire Cohen or provided funding for his engagement.”

To put it mildly, this explanation doesn’t seem entirely convincing. With his background in taxicab medallions, small-time real-estate deals, and failed Trump projects, including a venture into mixed martial arts, Cohen hardly has a reputation as a great investor or business strategist. Before Columbus Nova and the other entities started paying him, he reportedly didn’t have enough cash to pay off Daniels without taking out a bank loan. Of course, after Trump got elected, Cohen had something else to sell: potential access to the President, for whom he was still a private attorney.

5. Is the special counsel Robert Mueller looking into these payments?

It appears that he is. Earlier this year, federal agents working for Mueller confronted Vekselberg after he got off a private plane at an airport in the New York area, according to a recent report in the Times. The article said the agents questioned Vekselberg and searched his electronic devices. It also said that members of Mueller’s team have interviewed Intrater, who is the chief executive of Columbus Nova.

The Times story didn’t say what Mueller’s investigators asked Vekselberg about, and when it was published, the payments to Cohen hadn’t been publicly revealed. But, on Tuesday, CNN reported that the federal agents asked Vekselberg about these payments and also about the hefty donations that Intrater made to the Trump campaign and the Trump Inauguration committee.

6. Why did A.T. & T. and other large companies give all that money to Cohen?

On the face of it, the payments seem like pay-for-play arrangements. At least two of the companies—A.T. & T. and Korea Aerospace Industries—had important matters before the U.S. government. And the government officials they were dealing with were ultimately answerable to Trump.

The A.T. & T. case seems particularly egregious. For much of last year, the Justice Department was deciding whether to approve a merger with Time Warner, which Trump had criticized during his campaign. Although the department ultimately went to court to try to block the merger, it is easy to see why A.T. & T.’s brass might have thought it worthwhile to engage somebody who had the President’s ear, and to pay him handsomely.