You then answer it based on not so much evidence.
A lot of people have Russian connections. What's important is to look at the time depth and nature of the connections. I have connections, some with what I'm pretty sure were organized crime or dyed-in-the-wool anti-American big-C Communists. They were work or study connections. The first, because in the '90s Russians were reaching out for ties with the US and almost all of them had organized crime connections. The second because I happened to be on an overseas programs that Russians could also participate in--chteli jsme se vycit cestine v Brne (we wanted to learn Czech in Brno).
We won't even discuss connections from purchases from companies that probably have murky ties to the PTB in Rossiya, whether the DC-adjacent Kamkin Bookstore that was almost certainly a KGB hangout or par venue bookdealers in various cities, but all of which have to stay in the government's good graces. Heck, I've also bought stuff directly from Iran and China and Lebanon (I'm pretty sure that the Teheran purchases violated the trade sanctions, but nobody cares when you're buying a bunch of different farhangs, and there's know way to know if the place in Beirut had ties to Hezbollah or the Xian erstwhile terrorist group).
I still have connections with a Putin-related organization in Russia. (How do I know it's Putin-related? Because it's government funded, and everything governmental or important in Russia is Putin related. Heck, some screwball names on the governing board get bandied about as FoPs. Yet I'm a lowly contractor--I get sent something, I do what I do, I send it back, and money appears on my account. And as a result a few people get to read something in English originally published in Russian.
Then again, I have peers who have no connection with Russia. Some of them studied not Russian but French. Go figure. Yet anybody with sufficient business internationally, or in certain fields in the US, will have Russian business connections. Anybody sufficiently important and in the right financial or business circles will be invited to events at which Russians are present, whether diplomatic or business or entertainment. And given how much the FSB, GRU, and other organizations still use undercover informants you can never be sure which of those are "government spies" and which are just rank-and-file Russians. Without knowing the background rate of such connections, you can't know if a particular set are excessive. And even then, a bit of statistics are needed to tell if it's random variation or intentional. In the absence of evidence, we usually substitute suspicion.
Note that nobody would care if the French bookstore that used to be in LA (don't know if it's still around) I dropped into every once in a while when I lived there, or the work I did in translating French documents for the Guitar Foundation of America had something to do with the French government or the French diplomatic folk I met at some student government function turned out to be spies.
In fact, that might be a proxy. How many of these figures have connections with two or more other countries?
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