One month before the 2016 election, the FBI applied for a FISA warrant to surveil Page, which House Republicans—led by Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes—have tried repeatedly to characterize as but one part of a politically motivated spying operation targeting innocent Trump campaign associates carried out by the Obama administration and its holdovers, justified by nothing more than raw intelligence collected by a former British intelligence agent named Christopher Steele. The warrant application needs to be fully declassified, Nunes told Fox News on Monday, so that the public can “really understand just how broad and invasive this investigation has been to many Americans, and how unfair it has been.”

But it’s looking more and more like House Republicans have chosen to die on a hill that’s shifting below their feet. “Be careful what you wish for,” Democratic Senator Mark Warner, the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters on Tuesday. He was indicating, according to an aide, that “it’s simply impossible to review the documents” on Page and conclude anything other than that the FBI “had ample reason” to investigate him. It’s not only Democratic senators who believe that: Republican Senator Richard Burr, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CNN in July that he believes the FISA judges had “sound reasons” for issuing the Page surveillance warrant to the FBI. “I don’t think I ever expressed that I thought the FISA application came up short,” Burr said at the time.

There was a reason why Trump and his allies worked so hard to distance themselves from Page toward the end of the election and into last year: He had come under scrutiny for traveling to Russia in July 2016, at the height of the election, ostensibly just to deliver a speech at Moscow’s New Economic School. The Steele dossier, which alleged a conspiracy between Trump and the Kremlin to win the 2016 election, said that while in Moscow Page had met with Igor Sechin—a Vladimir Putin ally and the executive chairman of Russia’s state oil company, Rosneft—to discuss lifting U.S. sanctions in exchange for the brokerage of a 19 percent stake in the oil giant. Unredacted portions of the Page FISA applications, released by the Justice Department in July in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, said that “the FBI believes that the Russian government’s efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with” Trump’s campaign, and that Page “has established relationships with Russian government officials, including Russian intelligence officers.”

Page, who lived in Moscow in the early 2000s while he was an investment banker for Merrill Lynch, wrote occasional blog posts from 2013 to 2014 in which he praised Sechin for his “accomplishments” in advancing U.S.-Russia relations and criticized the U.S. sanctions on Russia as “sanctimonious expressions of moral superiority.” In numerous interviews and television appearances following the dossier’s publication in January 2017, Page vehemently and indignantly denied the document’s accusations—including that he had met with any government officials while in Moscow—and agreed to testify before the House Intelligence Committee last October. There, his story changed.