In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki last July, House Intelligence Committee member Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff, then the ranking Democrat on the panel, introduced a measure to subpoena the only American witness to the more than two-hour-long private meeting between the two leaders—the interpreter. Every Republican on the committee voted “no,” and the motion failed.

But now, newly empowered and wielding subpoena power in the majority, House Democrats are once again considering extraordinary actions to force transparency on the president. “We thought that it was fishy back then,” Swalwell told me Monday evening. “And my fear is that, since July, over the last six months, there has only been more evidence that the president has been acting on Russia’s behalf and we don’t know what was exchanged in that meeting.” Chief among the questionable policy decisions the Trump administration has made in recent months is the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, a Russian client state, and moves to ease sanctions on the business empire of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska—both actions that Swalwell believes may have been guided by a sinister purpose. “We have a president who is taking actions that are contra to what U.S. policy has always been, and I don’t believe that that is because of how the president feels,” he said. “I think he is a transaction-driven individual and this seems to align more with some arrangement that he has with the Russians.”

There is a growing urgency behind these efforts, following a Washington Post story that detailed the lengths Trump went to shield his interactions with Putin from his West Wing staff, as well as a New York Times report that Trump privately told officials he wanted to withdraw from NATO. The first Trump-Putin meeting, in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017, is of particular interest to lawmakers. The interpreter in that meeting said President Trump instructed him not to discuss details of the sit-down and confiscated his notes when several U.S. officials asked him what had transpired, according to the Post.

The only detail the interpreter reportedly shared with the officials—including Fiona Hill, the senior Russia adviser at the National Security Council, and John Heffern, then the acting assistant secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs at State—was that Trump told Putin, “I believe you,” when the Russian president denied interfering in the 2016 presidential election. The Hamburg meeting is just one of five off-record meetings between the two leaders that Democrats are eager to probe. Another is Helsinki, where Trump famously dismissed the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia had interfered in the election and affirmed, again, that he saw no reason to believe Putin wasn’t telling him the truth. Several U.S. officials told the Post that they were never able to get a substantive readout of the two leaders’ private conversation. (A White House spokesperson told the Post that former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was in attendance at the Hamburg meeting, “gave a fulsome readout of the meeting immediately afterward to other U.S. officials in a private setting, as well as a readout to the press.”)

Despite the White House’s attempts to downplay the Post’s reporting, former U.S. officials I spoke with said the president’s behavior is anything but normal. “I have never, ever heard of that happening. It is shocking, actually,” a former high-ranking State Department official told me, outlining the deliberate and meticulous record-making process that typically takes place after such high-level meetings. This person recalled that even after former Secretary of State John Kerry held occasional one-on-one meetings with foreign leaders and officials, they would debrief the top diplomat as soon as possible and often have a debrief with the interpreter as well. Given the Russia cloud hanging over the White House, the president’s behavior is particularly befuddling. “If he were a normal person he would want that meeting to have been very carefully recorded by somebody else to demonstrate that he wasn’t doing anything weird,” this person told me.