• A $15,000 crystal horse for a premier, and $10,000 in golf outings and a trip to Las Vegas for his son;

• And a $4,254 bottle of French wine for a top state banking official.

It was part of Deutsche Bank’s effort to win favor in China, and it worked, Michael Forsythe, David Enrich and Alexandra Stevenson of the NYT report: “By 2011, the German company would be ranked by Bloomberg as the top bank for managing initial public offerings in China and elsewhere in Asia, outside Japan.”

The documents “show that the bank’s top leadership was warned about the activity but did not stop it,” the NYT reports. The bank paid $16 million in August to settle accusations by the S.E.C. of misconduct in China and Russia.

Josef Ackerman, who was the bank’s C.E.O. until 2012, denied having knowledge of many details in the documents, but defended the broader strategy. “This was part of doing business in this country,” he told the NYT.

OPINION — On the day that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on election interference came out, cable news anchors strained to race through its 448 pages and describe the findings, all in the same breath. Computer sleuths hacked the document’s setting to let users search for “Trump,” “president,” “collusion” and “Russia.” Talking-head lawyers feverishly opined that Volume I contained less incriminating information than Volume II.

But around the country, voters mostly gave an “Is that all there is?” shoulder shrug and went back to their corners. Many members of Congress admitted they didn’t even bother to read it.

Nearly six months later, and to almost no fanfare last week while Congress was in recess, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the second of two installments of its own bipartisan investigation into roughly the same topic. The slim, 85-page report reads like a Russian spy novel crossed with a sequel to Orwell’s most dystopian version of the future — right down to an interview with a paid Russian troll who said his experience in 2016, pitting American voters against each other with social media platforms of their own making, was like being “a character in the book ‘1984’ by George Orwell — a place where you have to write that white is black and black is white.”

Telling it like it is

Unlike Mueller, who seemed to take great pains not to point fingers and softened his recommendations, the Intelligence Committee, led by Chairman Richard Burr and Vice Chairman Mark Warner, put its warnings in the starkest possible terms. First, the Russians deliberately attacked American voters with an active measures campaign in 2016 to benefit Donald Trump and destroy Hillary Clinton. On the morning after Election Day, a former troll told the committee, exhausted hackers in St. Petersburg, Russia, uncorked tiny of champagne. They looked into each other’s eyes.