“THE Crown prosecutor of Russia...offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and be very useful to your father. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump.” So wrote Rob Goldstone, a British tabloid-journalist-turned-publicist, in an e-mail to Donald Trump junior, son of the then presidential candidate, on June 3rd 2016. “Seems we have some time and if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” replied Donald junior, 20 minutes later.

The following day brought another exchange. “Emin asked that I schedule a meeting with you and The Russian government attorney who is flying over from Moscow,” wrote Mr Goldstone, who knew the younger Mr Trump from the Miss Universe contest, which the Trump family used to own. “How about 3 at our offices? Thanks rob appreciate you helping set it up,” came the reply. The meeting with the Russian lawyer duly took place on June 9th in Trump Tower in New York. Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s campaign manager at the time, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and now senior adviser in the White House, went along too. Both at first forgot to mention the meeting, which was uncovered by the New York Times, on their respective legal disclosures.

The rolling scandal over Russian interference in last year’s presidential election is made from so many fragments that the whole is hard to see. Before Mr Trump was a candidate, Russian investors and customers played an important part in rescuing his property businesses from financial difficulty. Then, in the judgment of the then director of national intelligence, whose job it is to co-ordinate the many different intelligence agencies, the Russian government intervened in the election to help Mr Trump and damage Mrs Clinton.

Adjusting the antenna

That judgment was repeated this May by a new director of national intelligence. It is not clear whether the Kremlin actually wanted Mr Trump to win, or just wanted to sow mistrust and discord (if so, an aim it has accomplished). Last, before taking office Mr Trump talked in admiring terms about Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, terms that were considerably more friendly than those he used about America’s allies, such as Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. At the beginning of his presidency, Mr Trump and his advisers dreamed of a grand bargain with Russia, lifting sanctions in exchange for help fighting Islamic State and containing China, though such a deal was never struck. These stories are unusual, but they do not necessarily amount to wrongdoing on the part of Mr Trump or his campaign.

This one is different. Whether the “very high level and sensitive” information was forthcoming—and Donald junior says it was not—he intended to work with someone presented to him as a representative of the Russians, and who was offering to incriminate Mrs Clinton. The information appears to have been second-hand stuff about donations to the Clinton Foundation. “I don’t think my sirens went [off] or my antenna went up at this time because it wasn’t the issue that it’s been made out to be over the last nine months, ten months,” the president’s son told Fox News on July 11th, by way of explanation.

For those not in the beauty-pageant or property businesses, Russia certainly was an issue in the summer of 2016. By that time American government sanctions had been in place for two years, following Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014. Individual members of the Russian government had been singled out for sanctions under the Magnitsky Act, an attempt to hold accountable those involved in the murder of a Russian whistleblower. A proposed meeting with a “Russian government attorney” to discuss sharing information should have prompted Donald junior to call the FBI. Instead, he listened and seems to have been mildly disappointed by the grade of dirt on offer. “It was literally just a wasted 20 minutes, which was a shame,” he told Fox News.

The White House has repeatedly denied that people from the campaign met representatives of the Russian government, a line that was already proved wrong after meetings with Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak, came to light. “Did I meet with people that were Russian? I’m sure, I’m sure I did,” Donald junior told the New York Times in March. “But none that were set up. None that I can think of at the moment. And certainly none that I was representing the campaign in any way, shape or form.”

Natalia Veselnitskaya, the “government” lawyer who met the Trump campaign, was not in fact working directly for the Russian government. Power in Russia is not a command-and-control system, with Mr Putin at the top issuing orders to everyone beneath him, though. It is more like a network, in which people pursue private interests which overlap with those of the state. Ms Veselnitskaya also defended the family of a former government minister accused of money laundering by the United States attorney for Manhattan, a charge that came from evidence supplied by Magnitsky. Mr Putin was defiant over the outcome of the Magnitsky case, in which a lawyer who was beaten to death in prison was posthumously charged with tax fraud. He awarded medals to some of the officials who worked on it. Ms Veselnitskaya seems to have lobbied the Trump campaign to repeal the Magnitsky Act.

If this all seems like evidence of an attempt at collusion with a hostile foreign power, the legal position is less straightforward. The Logan Act prohibits citizens from working against the government’s foreign policy, but nobody has been prosecuted under it since it was passed in 1799 and Donald junior is unlikely to break that streak. The portions of the constitution that deal with treason talk about aiding the enemy in a time of war, which he was not doing either. Next, campaign-finance law. The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 bans “contributions”, “donations” and “expenditures” from foreigners. The way it is written suggests that it means financial contributions rather than, say, electronic files. Some lawyers think the phrasing may be ambiguous enough to bring a lawsuit, but that opinion is not universal. That leaves the rest of the criminal law. If there is evidence that people working on the campaign asked for, or knowingly received, stolen e-mails, then they would be conspirators in a straightforward theft. Yet there is no evidence of this, and putting such a request in such a way as to leave a paper trail would be mind-numbingly stupid.

Politically, too, the reckoning may never arrive. The president has so often dismissed as fake news any suggestions that the Russian government was trying to help his campaign that his supporters tend to view the verdicts of the CIA and FBI on the matter as media inventions. Before Mr Trump’s election, Republicans were more likely to see Russia as an adversary than Democrats were, according to polling by Pew. In the months since, their positions have flipped. It would be nice to think that Americans could agree that political campaigns ought not to work with foreign governments who imprison and beat up their domestic political opponents. Nice, but probably unrealistic.