After questions emerged about whether campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page had ties to Russia, President Trump called him a “very low-level member” of a committee and said that “I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to him.”

When it was revealed that his son met with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower, the president told reporters that “zero happened from the meeting” and that “the press made a very big deal over something that really a lot of people would do.”

And, last week, with the revelation that adviser George Papadopoulos had pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents about his efforts to arrange meetings between Moscow and the Trump campaign, the president derided him as a “low-level volunteer.”

While Trump has sought to dismiss these Russia ties as insignificant, or characterized the people involved in them as peripheral figures, it has now become clear that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III views at least some of them as important pieces of his sprawling investigation of Russian meddling in last year’s presidential campaign.

Documents released last week as part of Papadopoulos’s guilty plea show that Mueller’s team is deeply interested in the Trump campaign’s operations, including possible links to Moscow, at even the lowest levels. And Mueller’s interest in Russian contacts may extend to Trump’s business, as well, with the special counsel’s office recently asking for records related to a failed 2015 proposal for a Moscow Trump Tower, according to a person familiar with the request.