It was clear and frosty on Capitol Hill on Thursday, and Republican congressman Will Hurd was sprawled across a leather chair in his office. He’d just come from the House floor, where he’d been giving a speech on the new trade deal to replace NAFTA—an issue that would likely impact his Texas constituents more directly than the previous night’s impeachment vote. Yet here he was, explaining his decision—surprising to some—to join with his fellow Republicans and reject the impeachment of the president.

“My definition of impeachment is a violation of the law. I’ve said that for years, that’s my standard,” Hurd told me. “I have not been bashful in my criticism of many of the foreign policy positions this administration has taken. Again, doing the second most serious thing a member of Congress can do—the first being sending troops to war—and this is where Speaker Pelosi is right: It should be clear, it should be compelling, it should be unambiguous, and it should be bipartisan, and none of those things were met. Impeachment is not a rebuke of policy. Impeachment is a violation of the law... The case that was being laid out was for bribery and extortion, and the evidence for either of those wasn’t there.”

If any Republican had been ripe for switching sides on impeachment—especially on an impeachment centering on foreign policy—it was Will Hurd. Before running for Congress in 2014, Hurd had been an undercover CIA officer, serving in hot spots like Pakistan and Afghanistan. As a congressman, he’s been critical of his party’s approach to minorities. (“Don’t be a racist,” he said at a meeting of LGBT Republicans. “Don’t be a misogynist, right? Don’t be a homophobe. These are real basic things that we all should learn when we were in kindergarten.”) He has taken an active and independent approach to international affairs and has often been critical of Trump’s iconoclasm. Last year, after Trump’s alarming joint press conference with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Hurd penned an op-ed in The New York Times excoriating the American president for being a pawn in the former KGB agent’s disinformation campaign. Then, in August, Hurd, the only black Republican in the House, announced that he would retire next year at the end of his third term. Democrats figured Hurd might be persuadable. He wasn’t.

A month ago, when the White House’s former Russia adviser Fiona Hill testified before the House Intelligence Committee, Hurd signaled where he stood on impeachment. Instead of asking Hill questions, Hurd delivered a set of remarks, saying that while he disagreed with Trump’s “bungling foreign policy,” the president’s actions nonetheless did not rise to the level of impeachable conduct. (He had decided even earlier than that, he told me. The day before Hill testified, Hurd, who had already participated in her closed-door deposition, says he realized that no new evidence was forthcoming and he was ready to make up his mind.)

Still, advocates of impeachment held out some hope that Hurd would come around. But on Wednesday night, he stuck to his guns and voted “no” on both articles.

The backlash from the national security world was immediate and unsparing. “This will be a black mark on @HurdOnTheHill’s long record of service,” tweeted Susan Hennessey, executive editor of Lawfare and a former lawyer for the NSA. John Sipher, a former CIA operative and a veteran of the agency’s Russia desk, remarked that Hurd made a “big mistake today.” Hurd was “taking a dive on impeachment,” wrote one national security reporter. “Do they have something on him?”