Of all the question marks surrounding the Trump campaign’s many ties to Russia, there is no greater enigma than Carter Page, the self-proclaimed expert on the Russian energy industry who Donald Trump named as one of his foreign policy advisers last year. At the time, nobody appeared to have ever heard of Page. He was all but forgotten until it was reported that he was being probed by U.S. intelligence for his potential ties to Russia.

One year later, Page is at the center of the Russian scandal surrounding President Trump and his campaign associates, who are currently among the targets of a wide-ranging federal investigation into Moscow’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. Earlier this month, Page admitted that he was indeed in communication with Russian spies, who was revealed in sealed F.B.I. documents to have been a top recruiting target. (Page insisted in a subsequent interview that he “didn’t want to be a spy.”) Days later, The Washington Post reported that the F.B.I. had obtained a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor Page.

And so Page, who his own would-be spy recruiter concluded was “an idiot,” decided to go on television Wednesday to clear up the matter. Instead, he made it far worse—at least for himself.

When asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper during an interview if he ever “conveyed to anyone in Russia” that “President Trump might have been more willing to get rid of the sanctions,” Page—a vocal critic of the sanctions imposed on Russia after its annexation of Crimea—responded that he “never had any direct conversations such as that.” When pressed by the CNN host as to what he meant by “direct conversations,” Page denied having discussed the sanctions. “Well, I’m just saying no—that was never—I’ve never said, no,” he replied.

But in another interview Thursday morning, Page seemed to change his story. While speaking with George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America, the former Trump adviser demurred. When first asked whether he told the Russians that Trump, if elected, would be open to easing the Obama-era sanctions, Page twice asserted that he had not. “Absolutely not,” he said. “I never offered that. Nothing along those lines. Absolutely not.”

Then he reconsidered. “I mean—it may—topics—I don’t remember—we’ll see what comes out in this FISA transcript,” he said. “I don’t recall every single word that I ever said. But I would never make any offer or intimate anything.”

Stephanopoulos, his interest piqued, returned to the original question. “But it sounds like from what you're saying it's possible that you may have discussed the easing of sanctions,” he said. Page hedged: “Something may have come up in a conversation. I have no recollection, and there's nothing specifically that I would have done that would have given people that impression.”

While Page has continually denied any wrongdoing, his reversal on the sanctions issue is sure to raise further questions about his connection to Trumpworld. Page has long been considered to be a bit player in the ongoing Russian melodrama, and was never a true Trump insider. More likely he was an opportunist who saw an opening, and an opportunity, in the chaos of the Trump campaign. Still, the economic impact of U.S. sanctions were clearly of interest to Moscow, which saw in Trump its best opportunity to have them lifted. Former national security adviser Mike Flynn also allegedly discussed U.S. sanctions with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the months ahead of Trump’s inauguration—an undisclosed conversation that ultimately led to his ouster in February. Page previously confirmed that he, too, met with Kislyak.

The circumstances surrounding Page joining the Trump campaign are unclear. During his interview with Tapper, Page would not say who first brought him onto the campaign, though he did say that it was not Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who was recently revealed to have received millions of dollars on behalf of a Russian oligarch to advance the Kremlin’s interests. According to a Daily Caller report published on Thursday, Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski first introduced Page to Sam Clovis, the policy director of the campaign, and the former joined the Trump team a few months later. (Lewandowski told the Daily Caller in a statement, “I don’t recall that meeting ever taking place, because I don’t think it ever took place.”)