A senior administration official told reporters in a background briefing on Sunday night that “Republicans on Capitol Hill wrote” the policy—a statement that Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, defended on Monday. But multiple top Republican aides said the assertion was false.

“Ha! That’s my formal response,” said one senior GOP aide. “There was precisely zero coordination with us on the drafting of this executive order.” The aide said that one or two “rogue staffers” with the House Judiciary Committee had worked informally with the White House on the order, but that the administration never formally involved the relevant congressional leaders. Separately, an aide with the Judiciary Committee said that the panel’s chairman, Representative Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, was “not consulted by the administration”—a sign that the staffers working under him had helped the White House without Goodlatte’s knowledge. Politico reported Monday night that the Judiciary Committee staffers signed nondisclosure agreements.

The aides insisted on anonymity to avoid provoking a further fight with the new president, but they spoke with more candor than the more diplomatic statements that GOP members of Congress have released in recent days. Officials said John Kelly, the secretary of homeland security, will meet with a bipartisan group of lawmakers Tuesday in the Capitol to discuss the the executive order.

Trump’s executive order has plenty of support from conservative immigration hawks on Capitol Hill, including from those, like Brat, who thought the administration stumbled in rolling it out. “I think there’s a need for some of these moves before something happens that’s really bad,” Brat told me, referring to the fear that a terrorist might infiltrate the refugee program or otherwise slip into the United States without being detected. Echoing Trump, he faulted both the media and Democrats for overreacting to the order and exaggerating the havoc it wrought at airports.

Many other Republicans, however, argued that the order was overly broad and poorly vetted, leaving them unable to properly defend a policy they would otherwise support on narrower grounds.

“While we certainly need to enhance our current vetting process and significantly reform our immigration policies to make sure terrorists are not exploiting our nation’s proud tradition of freedom and acceptance, the president's policy entirely misses the mark,” Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, a freshman Republican, said on Monday.

One senior GOP aide said that some of the confusion about congressional involvement in the executive order resulted from comments that former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani made Saturday night on Fox News, in which he said the policy began when Trump asked him to form “a commission” to draft a “Muslim ban” in a legal way. That group included McCaul, Representative Peter King of New York, and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, according to Giuliani. The congressional aide familiar with the talks said all the group did was write a memo for Trump that explicitly advised him not to pursue a blanket ban on Muslims entering the U.S., as he had promised on the campaign trail.