On Thursday, accused Russian spy Maria Butina walked into a downtown Washington, D.C., courtroom and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as an illegal foreign agent. The 30-year-old Russian national, who spent years infiltrating Republican political networks including the National Rifle Association, had originally pleaded not guilty. But after being held for months in solitary confinement in Virginia, Butina agreed to cooperate with federal investigators, providing information on her boyfriend, Paul Erickson, a G.O.P. political operative who helped her make connections in Washington, as well as a Russian official, Alexander Torshin, who Butina admitted in her allocution had directed her activities.

Butina’s guilty plea is potentially bad news for her boyfriend, who may in turn face a charge of conspiracy for working to advance her interests, including floating the possibility of setting up a back-channel meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. But it is even more concerning for the N.R.A., the Republican-aligned pro-gun-rights group with which Butina was deeply involved. According to a McClatchy report from January, the F.B.I. has been looking into whether illegal Russian money may have comprised some part of the $30 million the N.R.A. gave the Trump campaign in 2016—triple what it invested on behalf of Mitt Romney in 2012. The N.R.A. has fessed up to having received about $2,500 from Russian sources, including a small gift from Torshin, which the group attributed to dues for a “life membership.” But as my colleague Chris Smith reported in June, Senate Democrats and Robert Mueller suspect there could be more to the story. (Investigators may also be interested in oligarch Konstantin Nikolaev, the Kremlin-connected Russian billionaire who reportedly bankrolled some of Butina’s operations.)

Torshin has been wooing the N.R.A. and its former president David Keene since 2011. According to a 2018 report from NPR, Torshin was close enough to Keene and other N.R.A. leadership to visit headquarters and attend national meetings over the years, frequently as Keene’s special guest. Occasionally, he would tweet photos of his visits, posing with N.R.A. officials and showing off his gifts to members. (The caption for a tweet with a picture of a book on Russian tanks: “Bought a gift for N.R.A. President Allan Cors. Tanks are his favorite topic!”) The relationships he built across the N.R.A. continued to deepen as Trump considered a presidential run. In December 2015, the same month Michael Flynn dined with Putin in Moscow, Torshin welcomed an N.R.A. delegation to the Russian capital that included Keene and other top donors. (Other hosts included Dmitry Rogozin, until recently the deputy prime minister, and Sergei Rudov, a major Russian philanthropist.) Later, in 2016, Torshin would also meet Donald Trump Jr. at an N.R.A. dinner. (Alan Futerfas, an attorney for Trump Jr., has characterized the meeting as simply “small talk” between two gun enthusiasts.)

“There are a lot of unanswered questions,” Senator Ron Wyden, who has spent months pushing the N.R.A. to explain the sources of its funding, told Smith. (The N.R.A. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Observers of the Mueller probe wonder if Butina’s cooperation with federal investigators could ultimately shed some light on the connections between Moscow and N.R.A. leadership—and potentially reveal whether any Russian money flowed illegally through the N.R.A. to Trump’s campaign. In addition to the $2,500, Mother Jones has documented extensive evidence of ties between the Russian government and the N.R.A., including a photo of Torshin at an exclusive event for donors who gave at least $1 million, as well as photos of him attending closed-door events with N.R.A. leadership. The claim that Torshin was never a major donor is hard to square with the V.I.P. treatment he regularly received from the organization’s top brass, who not only fêted him, but attended events thrown by the group Torshin helped establish, the Right to Bear Arms, in turn. (High-profile conservative officials were happy to help Torshin, too: in 2013, John Bolton recorded a video for the group to promote gun rights in Russia.)