Figliuzzi agrees. “This isn’t for the rookies,” he says. “Whoever the best interviewers and fact finders are, they’ll be pulled” from their ordinary roles and placed on the Kavanaugh investigation. In the Kavanaugh case, the bureau’s security division is “running the show, likely with lots of input from the ‘seventh floor’—the director’s office,” Frank Montoya Jr., a former FBI special agent who led the Seattle field office until 2016, told me. Says Figliuzzi: “It will go right up to [Deputy FBI Director] David Bowdich, who’s got to be all over this and briefing FBI Director [Christopher] Wray three times per day.” The FBI will ultimately report its findings to the White House and the Senate.

As of Monday afternoon, the FBI had interviewed three potential witnesses—Mark Judge, Patrick J. Smyth, and Leland Keyser—to the allegations made by Christine Blasey Ford, a professor who testified last week that Kavanaugh had assaulted her at a high-school party in 1982, according to The Washington Post. Agents also interviewed Deborah Ramirez, a former classmate of Kavanaugh’s who alleged that he exposed himself to her when they were undergraduates at Yale.

The investigation is a far cry from the cross-examination Ford was subjected to last week by a sex-crimes prosecutor hired by Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans. (The prosecutor, Rachel Mitchell, appeared to still be working for the Republicans as of Monday, according to a committee source, and continues to have a committee email address.) But the FBI’s background investigation was still extremely limited at the outset, according to reports published over the weekend, and the White House was pressured to expand its scope on Monday.

Trump insisted that he never ordered the FBI to restrict the probe in the first place, but the primary liaison between the bureau and the White House has been White House Counsel Don McGahn. McGahn has been shepherding Kavanaugh through the confirmation process and reportedly told Democratic Senator Chris Coons this week that the background investigation was being done “by the book.” That does not mean it is appropriately comprehensive, however—Figliuzzi cautioned against putting any weight in claims that this is a “standard” investigation, since standard background probes are typically conducted before any derogatory information has been presented about the person being investigated.

Coons told the Post that he “came away from” his conversation with McGahn realizing that agents would not be expanding their investigation to include witnesses they learn about in the course of their initial interviews who might be able to corroborate specific claims. A lawyer for Debbie Ramirez, John Clune, echoed that concern on Tuesday, writing in a series of tweets that “we are not aware of the FBI affirmatively reaching out to any” of the more than 20 witnesses Ramirez identified in her interview who may have corroborating information. “Though we appreciated the agents who responded on Sunday, we have great concern that the FBI is not conducting—or not being permitted to conduct—a serious investigation,” he tweeted.