THE FBI is investigating whether the Trump campaign worked with the Russian government. The National Security Agency continues to think that the Russian government intervened in last year’s election on behalf of the current president. The directors of the FBI and National Security Agency can find no evidence that supports allegations made by the current president that his predecessor wiretapped his phone.

Presented with these bits of news, which came from the opening exchanges of a hearing in the House intelligence committee, what was uppermost in the minds of the committee’s Republican members? Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the committee, began his opening statement by describing the ways in which the Russian government had tried to influence elections in the West through an updated version of KGB tactics known as “active measures”. He talked about how Russia bullies its neighbours in the Baltic states and uses a pretend news channel, Russia Today, to disseminate propaganda.

The hearing then took a strange turn. Having excoriated Russia, Mr Nunes then explained that it was also important to focus on the leaks from within the federal bureaucracy that had resulted in Michael Flynn, the national-security adviser, losing his job for covering up conversations with the ambassador for Russia, the country Mr Nunes had just so eloquently denounced as an adversary.

Mr Nunes’s colleagues, Tom Rooney and Trey Gowdy, picked this up. The real issue which the FBI and NSA should be focused on, they suggested, the issue that threatens national security is this: who leaked the news of Mr Flynn’s meeting with the Russian ambassador? The journalists who allegedly published this classified piece of information should be prosecuted. The officials who provided the journalist with the information should be prosecuted too. And who were those officials anyway? Mr Gowdy provided a helpful list of suggestions for the FBI to investigate: Ben Rhodes (an adviser to Barack Obama), Susan Rice (the president’s National Security Adviser), Loretta Lynch (Mr Obama’s attorney-general), Sally Yates (the deputy attorney-general) and Mr Obama.

This makes so little sense that to even say so is an affront to sensibleness. Had news of Mr Flynn’s conversations with the Russian government not been leaked, he would still be in his job. This would be good for the aforementioned Russia Today, which hosted Mr Flynn at a jamboree. It would be good for the Russian government, which Mr Nunes described as a menace to Western democracies. It would not be very good for Mike Pence, the vice-president, whom Mr Flynn deceived over his conversations with the Russian ambassador.

One of the most trusted Soviet techniques during the Cold War came to be known in the West as “what-about-ism”. Faced with an accusation, for example that the Soviet Union worked political dissidents to death in prison camps, the propagandist would respond: well, what about those black men being forced to work on chain gangs in the South? This was effective, because by the time anyone had explained that the two are not, in fact, morally equivalent, the technique had done its work, changing the subject away from the gulag.

Mr Rooney and Mr Gowdy are not Russian propagandists, so why all the what-about-ism? The line of questioning only makes sense in a world where the most important topic of the moment is not what the precise relationship was between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, but the treasonous attacks on Donald Trump from within the deep state, a world where no matter what the question, the answer is always criminal behaviour by President Obama and his cronies. It would be comforting to think this was born of the ordinary variety of political cynicism, or of a desire to please the president. The more frightening conclusion, which remains a real possibility, is that they actually believe it. On this evidence America doesn’t need any foreign interference to subvert its democracy. It is perfectly capable of doing that alone.

Despite this, the hearing was ultimately uplifting. If one of the big questions of the Trump era is whether institutions are strong enough for the tests to come, here was some evidence that they are. Congress is doing its job, in the sense of holding hearings, and the FBI seems to be doing its job too. At some point the agency will either have to bring charges, or conclude that there is nobody to prosecute. At that moment the riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma that is Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election, will be a little clearer.