Two weeks into a vociferous campaign questioning the integrity of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, elements of the Republican narrative have begun to unravel.

President Donald Trump’s own Justice Department pushed back this week against allegations that the FBI abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act during the probe. In a letter, the Trump-appointed assistant attorney general for legislative affairs told the Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee that the department was “currently unaware of any wrongdoing relating to the FISA process.”

Claims from some Republican lawmakers that there existed a “secret society” of anti-Trump FBI agents also started to fall apart, as ABC News obtained the sole text message on which the claim appeared to be based — a text message many have since suggested could have been made in jest. Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, who’d helped spread the “secret society” claim on Fox News this week, admitted to CNN Thursday that the text could have been a joke. The night before, the New York Times reported the text might have been a glib reference to a gag gift — Russia-themed calendars — that agents had received.

Meanwhile, another text exchange between FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page cast doubt on Republican allegations that Strzok’s animus toward Trump had fueled the Trump-Russia probe. Instead, the text appears to show that Strzok, who was the lead investigator in the early months of the probe, was hesitant to join special counsel Robert Mueller’s team. "You and I both know the odds are nothing,” his text to Page said, according to Johnson. “If I thought it was likely, I'd be there no question. I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern there's no there there."

And the assertions of a corrupt conspiracy to protect Strzok, fueled by revelations that months of text messages between him and Page had disappeared, suffered a blow Thursday when the Justice Department’s inspector general reported that the missing texts had been recovered. The day before, the FBI also revealed that thousands of its phones – not just Strzok's and Page’s – had been affected by the technical glitch that it says deleted the messages, further undercutting the theory that their communications were being concealed from investigators.

The developments were greeted with ribbing by critics of the Republicans’ concerns, with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s vice chair, Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, tweeting a joke about the so-called secret society.