On Thursday night, my phone started blowing up with D.C. Russia hands sending me a link to a story in the Rappahannock News, reporting that the F.B.I. had searched the home of Dimitri Simes, a Russian-American political analyst who used to run the Center for the National Interest. (The Center hosted Donald Trump’s foreign policy speech in April 2016, and Simes and others associated with the Center provided advice to the Trump campaign and maintained ties with Trump’s administration.)

Simes has long been the subject of rumors that he was some kind of Russian asset. It didn’t help that he was named repeatedly in Robert Mueller’s report, nor did it help when he got his own TV show, The Big Game, on the Kremlin’s flagship Channel One. In October 2022, a few months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Simes moved to Moscow to host The Big Game full-time. That fall, Simes, an American citizen, also received Russian citizenship after, he said, he requested it from the Russian president.