So much is happening on so many fronts involving the president that it leaves those of us who try to follow it all gasping for air. Until now, this served Trump’s interest: the less we can focus any one thing the less trouble he’s likely to seem to be in. Despite my college freshman English professor admonishing us to never use the word “seem”—“It is or it isn’t,” he insisted—I use it here because what we in Washington see may not comport with underlying reality. The most prominent example of this is Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russia’s role in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign’s possible role in that effort. But the impressive secrecy of Mueller and his team has left us with scraps of information from witnesses and their lawyers, and none of them has the complete picture of what Mueller is seeing.

Mueller’s charter permits him to go into ancillary issues that may arise out of the core investigation, and at this point we can’t know, and possibly Mueller can’t, either, what’s ancillary. In a special prosecutor investigation, what once seemed ancillary can transition into being central to the story. When the investigation began into Whitewater, a questionable investment that Bill and Hillary Clinton had made in Arkansas, no one had heard of Monica Lewinsky. The Whitewater deal turned out to be a nothing, but the Lewinsky scandal nearly brought down Clinton’s presidency.

Simlarly, could a mysterious meeting in the Seychelles in January 2017, before Trump’s inauguration, lead to explosive discoveries? The meeting was apparently arranged by a new figure on the scene, George Nader, a Lebanese fixer and an adviser to the Crown Prince of the United Arab Emirates, with ties to the Trump entourage. (The meeting was called in the Crown Prince’s name but it appears the person who made it happen was Nader—who by the way is now cooperating with Mueller.) Also at the meeting was Erik Prince, the founder of the private security firm Blackwater, which played a controversial role in the Iraq War and is now called Acadami, like something out of The Da Vinci Code. Prince was also an adviser to the Trump transition team, and had known Nader for a long time. The third figure at the meeting was yet another Russian close to Vladimir Putin, Kirill Dmitriev, who presides over Russia’s $10 billion sovereign investment fund, which had been sanctioned by the U.S. during Barack Obama’s presidency. Theoretically, Americans shouldn’t be dealing with a sanctioned Russian entity, but such niceties have long since been abandoned in the Era of Trump.

Press reports say that Mueller is interested in whether Dmitriev funneled Russian money into the Trump campaign, but something else about this meeting caught my attention. It’s been reported that the principals discussed how to establish a back channel between Russia and the Trump administration. This makes the meeting at least the second time the back channel was brought up. It may be recalled that, in December of 2016, international policy whiz Jared Kushner spoke of this same matter with the Russian ambassador to Washington. In his typically dim way, Kushner suggested that the back channel be operated out of the Russian embassy in Washington.

Why was a back channel to the Kremlin deemed so important? Might that have been a way for Trump to get orders from Putin? This sounds fantastical, but the fantastical has become the real in the Era of Trump. This brings up something else I’ve been curious about: How does Trump know what policies would please Putin? How did he know this throughout his campaign as well as into his presidency? Was there a back channel then, and if so, who was it?