Two prominent Republican lawmakers have jumped into the expanding mêlée between Donald Trump allies and the F.B.I. Late Tuesday, Congressmen Bob Goodlatte and Trey Gowdy penned a letter to the Justice Department seeking interviews with three bureau employees—Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Chief of Staff James Rybicki, and F.B.I. Counsel Lisa Page—as soon as Thursday about the investigation into the Trump campaign, and the separate investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server during her time at the helm of the State Department. “Among other things, the Committees are investigating the circumstances surrounding the F.B.I.’s decision to publicly announce the investigation into former Secretary Clinton’s handling of classified information, but not to publicly announce the investigation into campaign associates of then-candidate Donald Trump,” Goodlatte, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Gowdy, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, wrote in the letter, which was addressed to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

The lawmakers’ request comes as tensions between the F.B.I. and the right are beginning to boil over. Trump and his right-wing allies have seized on the news that Page and Peter Strzok exchanged dozens of anti-Trump text messages during the campaign to dismiss Robert Mueller’s escalating collusion probe. Despite the special prosecutor’s quick dismissal of Strzok when he learned of the exchanges, and the fact that Page had previously left the investigation for unrelated reasons, Fox News and conservatives have used the texts to position the investigation as, in the words of Sean Hannity, “a disgrace to the American justice system.”

With boogeyman James Comey out of the picture and Mueller arguably untouchable thanks to the implications of a “Saturday massacre 2.0,” McCabe has emerged as the chosen avatar of F.B.I. bias. Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has called for the deputy F.B.I. director’s ouster, and on Tuesday, after McCabe’s marathon eight-hour testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Gowdy told Fox News that the agent “cuts across every facet of every investigation in 2016 that your viewers are interested in, from Secretary Clinton’s e-mails to the investigation into the Trump campaign.”

Rybicki also finds himself in Republican crosshairs over his involvement in the Clinton e-mail probe; the F.B.I. official was among those aware of a statement Comey drafted outlining his decision not to bring charges against Clinton before the investigation had been concluded. Both Strzok and Page worked on the Clinton investigation as well. Politico’s Kyle Cheney predicted that Republican lawmakers could hit all three with subpoenas, further chipping away at the credibility of an investigation they fear is snowballing.