CHARGES of collusion over an inquiry into collusion, probes and counterprobes: the swirl of hearings and allegations stemming from Russian meddling in the presidential election is becoming wearyingly hard to follow—which, for some, may be the point. This week, after a bizarre episode in which Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, met a source on the White House grounds, then rushed to brief Donald Trump about his supposedly explosive findings, senior Democrats, and even the odd Republican, called for him to recuse himself from his committee’s investigation. (He refused.) The stunts and partisan rows make it seem worryingly unlikely that what are, in effect, whispers of treason can be either substantiated or dispelled.

Be clear what the real allegation is, and what it is not. It is not that Vladimir Putin stole the election. No sane observer thinks the Kremlin persuaded 63m Americans to vote for Mr Trump. Even the milder version of that claim—that Russia’s propaganda and its hacking of Democratic e-mails tipped the result in tight swing states—cannot be either confirmed or refuted. That unverifiability may explain why Mr Trump and his supporters like to pretend this is the issue at stake; likewise they stress that Russia’s electronic interference did not alter the election tallies. The real fear is narrow and different. As James Comey, director of the FBI, told Mr Nunes’s committee on March 20th, it is that individuals in Mr Trump’s campaign may have co-ordinated with the Russians in what, according to America’s intelligence agencies, was a bid to help him win the presidency. That would be a scandal whatever impact the Russian antics had. Or it ought to be.

The suspicion is not baseless. To recap the mounting, if circumstantial, evidence: Michael Flynn misled Mike Pence, the vice-president, about his chats during the presidential transition with Sergei Kislyak, the Russian ambassador. Mr Flynn said they didn’t discuss sanctions, but they did; since he was forced to resign as national security adviser, more details have emerged about his paid speechmaking for Russian companies (and lobbying for Turkish interests). Paul Manafort stopped being Mr Trump’s campaign manager amid consternation over his ties to Viktor Yanukovych, the disgraced ex-president of Ukraine who has been given refuge in Russia. According to the Associated Press, Mr Manafort was once retained by Oleg Deripaska, a tycoon close to the Kremlin, allegedly undertaking “to benefit the Putin government”. Mr Deripaska has denounced that report as a “malicious assertion and lie”.

Meanwhile Roger Stone, a longtime associate of Mr Trump, occasionally seemed to have advance notice of Democratic e-mails published last year by WikiLeaks, the portal through which, according to Mr Comey and others, Russian hackers released their loot. Mr Stone has admitted being in indirect contact with Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ founder, and exchanging messages with Guccifer 2.0, an online persona considered a front for Russian spooks. Carter Page, once named as an adviser by Mr Trump, made an interestingly timed trip to Moscow last July. Jeff Sessions, the attorney-general, recused himself from all Russia-related inquiries after failing to disclose his own meetings with Mr Kislyak at his confirmation hearing. During the transition Jared Kushner, Mr Trump’s son-in-law and consigliere, met both Mr Kislyak and (it has emerged) Sergei Gorkov, the head of a Russian state bank placed under sanctions by Barack Obama’s administration. The New York Times has reported further leads from intercepted Russian communications and friendly European spies.

As the White House says, nothing in the public domain so far amounts to collusion. All those involved deny wrongdoing; many have offered to testify to Congress. Contact with foreign diplomats is not a sin. To some, joining these unrelated dots into a picture of conspiracy is a 21st-century form of reds-under-the-bed hysteria.

The trouble is, some of the denials—such as the absurd protestation by Sean Spicer, Mr Trump’s press secretary, that Mr Manafort “played a very limited role” in the campaign—have made the picture look worse. So have the attempted distractions, chiefly Mr Trump’s debunked ravings about Mr Obama wiretapping Trump Tower. After Mr Nunes’s strange visits to the White House, during which he says he acquired, then relayed, information that some in the Trump camp had been caught up in legal monitoring of foreign targets, Mr Trump said he felt “somewhat” vindicated over the wiretapping nonsense—though even Mr Nunes has repudiated it.

In short, Mr Trump’s team are behaving like men with something to hide. At the bottom of the hunch is his own rhetoric: a candidate, and now a president, who has been quick to criticise or insult judges, Republican senators and his own intelligence services, but never Mr Putin. This despite the Russian president’s inviting status as a bogeyman, especially among Republicans, and despite the embarrassment that Mr Trump’s affinity for him has entailed.

The rationale offered by the president’s advisers is that his long-standing aim is to do a deal with Mr Putin in American interests, by, for example, fighting Islamic State together. Any such scheme may now be scuppered: a Republican member of Congress said this week that a “grand bargain” with Russia was “politically impossible”. Whatever its merits—and they are slim—it is a stretch to believe Mr Trump farsightedly nurtured the plan at grave political cost to himself. He has not extended the same politesse either to erstwhile allies, such as Germany, or to adversaries, such as China.

Hear no lies

So long as Mr Trump’s finances remain opaque, the role of Russian money in his businesses—and his decision-making—will be a source of speculation. Maybe he genuinely admires Mr Putin. Another explanation for his bilious rage over the Russian story, which he calls “fake news”, is that he loathes slights of any kind: like the underwhelming crowds at his inauguration, the focus on Russian meddling seems to wound his pride. At the moment, the line between psychology and skulduggery is impossible to draw definitively. Nor do the ongoing inquiries offer early hope.

Mr Nunes, a former aide to Mr Trump, seemed to dismiss the idea of collusion before his committee’s hearings began; he and his fellow Republicans have since concentrated on excoriating the leaks that showed up Mr Flynn and others. He postponed a hearing this week that was to feature Sally Yates, whom Mr Trump fired as acting attorney-general in January. The Washington Post reported that the White House tried to shut down her testimony; Mr Spicer denied that. In any case, the committee’s work has stalled. The parallel Senate inquiry is less tarnished: its chairman, Richard Burr, and Mark Warner, his Democratic counterpart, put up a united front at a press conference on March 29th.

Otherwise there is the FBI, which Mr Comey said had been on the case since last July. Counter-intelligence is part of its remit. It has, of course, looked into abuses in the White House before, from Richard Nixon’s, to bribery allegations against Spiro Agnew, his vice-president, to the Iran-Contra affair during Ronald Reagan’s presidency and the White House Travel Office during Bill Clinton’s. But the confluence of these two tasks—a counter-intelligence operation that has dragged in the denizens of the White House itself—is unprecedented. It is an extraordinarily delicate job, which Mr Comey hinted may take many months.

So might the other solutions urged by those impatient with the multiple existing ones. The options include an independent commission, like that which examined the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, or a congressional panel like the Church Committee, which peered into intelligence-service methods in the 1970s. Both would require bipartisan consent. Some Democrats are agitating for a special prosecutor, who since Mr Sessions’s recusal would be appointed by his deputy. The history of such assignments suggests that fix would not be quick, either.

All inquiries, current and putative, face two further problems. First, conclusive proof may be elusive. (At least for America: if it exists, the Russians may have it.) Eyebrow-raising meetings may come to light, but not their content. Russian power is slippery and tentacular, often operating through businessmen instead of officials. Especially given the business interests of Mr Trump’s team, splitting treachery from mere venality may be tough. The second problem arises from a purely domestic pathology, for which Mr Putin can take no credit: feverish partisanship may lead Americans to differ on the gravity of whatever is found. For example, to some Republicans tacit foreknowledge of e-mail releases might seem a price worth paying for seeing off Hillary Clinton.

Mr Trump may be fully exonerated. The opposite may happen. But there are two other, dismaying possibilities. His administration may be condemned in the eyes of some Americans for tactics others consider forgivable. Or—perhaps most likely of all—it may be stained, but not capsized, by never-ending inquiries and suspicions that are neither proven or allayed.