IT SEEMED a little strange when, in an interview with the Washington Post in March of 2016, Donald Trump named Carter Page as a foreign-policy adviser. No one in the world of international relations seemed to have heard of him; even among expats in Moscow, where Mr Page spent a few years with Merrill Lynch before starting his own energy consultancy, he was scarcely remembered. Fairly soon Mr Trump’s campaign began to disavow him. The White House will doubtless do so even more vigorously after news that investigators strongly suspected he was working as an agent of Vladimir Putin’s government.

Citing anonymous sources, the Post now reports that last summer the FBI and the Justice Department sought and received a warrant to monitor Mr Page’s communications from a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA). To accomplish that, they had to persuade a judge that there was “probable cause” to believe Mr Page was acting as a foreign agent. Court records already in the public domain show that a man subsequently identified as Mr Page interacted with a Russian spook, who was posing as a diplomat, in New York in 2013 (Mr Page says only publicly available material was exchanged). He made an interestingly timed visit to Moscow last July, during which he made a speech that was highly critical of American foreign policy (he says the visit was unrelated to the campaign). He has acknowledged speaking briefly with the Russian ambassador at the Republican National Convention.

None of that, of course, means that he was (or is) a foreign agent. He denies all wrongdoing and has offered to testify to the congressional committees that are probing Russia’s role in the election; no criminal charges have been brought against him. And some of the rumours and allegations swirling around him seem somewhat far-fetched—such as the idea that, while in Moscow last year, he met with Igor Sechin, boss of Rosneft, the state-controlled energy giant and among the country’s most powerful figures. Indeed, on the basis of the interviews he has given, Mr Page seems an unlikely conduit for high-level transactions. The Russian spy he met in New York reportedly considered him “an idiot”.

Still, neither Mr Trump, nor for that matter the Russian intelligence services, have an unvarnished record of recruiting geniuses. And for all the insistences that Mr Page’s role in the campaign was marginal—both he and Mr Trump say they never met—the revelation of the FISA warrant is significant. Mr Trump’s critics will see it as powerful proof that those congressional inquiries, and the FBI’s underlying investigation into his campaign’s Russian links, should persevere—despite the apparent cooling in Russian-American relations since Mr Trump ordered missile strikes against Syria last week.

For its part the White House may reiterate its prior claim that the whole idea of collusion is a witch hunt, distance itself from Mr Page again, or both. Mr Page himself seems to have been caught between downplaying his own role in the campaign and preserving his personal dignity. In a letter to the Justice Department he claimed to have been the victim of “hate crimes” and “human-rights violations” by Hillary Clinton’s team, in part on the basis that he is a Roman Catholic and a man. He reportedly regards the FISA news as more evidence of his unjust persecution.

Perhaps he will ultimately be vindicated. Ask yourself this, however: how would the Republican Party and its supporters have responded if, while Barack Obama was president, a person he had named as a foreign-policy adviser had been found to be the subject of a FISA warrant?