Already weathering a wave of heightened scrutiny after suddenly recollecting a conversation about Russia that he had claimed did not occur, Jeff Sessions’s nightmare snowballed on Thursday. Carter Page, who like Papadopoulos was a member of Trump’s slapdash national security team, testified to Congress that he had informed the attorney general of a multi-day trip he took to Russia last year that has garnered the attention of Congressional investigators and special counsel Robert Mueller, plunging Sessions’s memory further into doubt and increasing the likelihood that he will be asked to explain his prior reticence.

During a six-and-a-half-hour, closed-door hearing before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday, Page told lawmakers that he had informed Sessions of his Moscow travel plans following a Washington dinner attended by the campaign’s national security team, CNN reports. “Back in June 2016, I mentioned in passing that I happened to be planning to give a speech at a university in Moscow,” Page told the outlet. “Completely unrelated to my limited volunteer role with the campaign, and as I’ve done dozens of times throughout my life. . . . If it weren’t for the dodgy dossier and all the chaos that those complete lies had created, my passing comment’s complete lack of relevance should go without saying.” According to Page, the brief exchange marked the only time he met Sessions, who was then an Alabama senator and the head of the Trump campaign’s national security team. A source familiar with the situation told CNN that Sessions did not respond to Page informing him of his travel plans, shifting his attention to someone else in attendance at the dinner.

Despite Page’s efforts to dismiss it, the disclosure intensified bipartisan calls for the attorney general to return and clarify, under oath, statements he‘d made about his knowledge of contacts between individuals connected to the Trump campaign and Russia. During a hearing last month, Sessions—who came under fire himself earlier this year for failing to tell Congress of his interactions with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak—told Senator Al Franken that Trump surrogates had no contact with Kremlin-linked individuals. “I did not, and I’m not aware of anyone else that did, and I don’t believe it happened,” he said.

When court documents unsealed on Monday revealed that Sessions attended the March 2016 meeting wherein Papadopoulos “stated, in sum and substance, that he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President [Vladimir] Putin,” Sessions reportedly changed his tune, suddenly remembering Papadopoulos’s offer. J.D. Gordon, a Trump campaign adviser who attended the meeting, told The New York Times that Sessions “vehemently” opposed the idea and immediately rejected Papadopoulos’s proposal. “He said that no one should talk about it,” Gordon added.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle said that Sessions’s reversal warranted further inquiry. “This is another example in an alarming pattern in which you, the nation’s top law enforcement official, apparently failed to tell the truth, under oath,” Senator Franken wrote in a letter to the attorney general on Thursday, the Times reports. Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, added that he “certainly thinks Sessions‘s flip-flop is a legitimate area of inquiry.” (Others were dismissive—“I don’t make anything sinister out of it,” Republican Congressman Mike Conaway, who has been pushing for a swift conclusion to the House probe, told CNN. “If I were Sessions, I wouldn't have recalled it either.”)

Following the week‘s turmoil, even Trump appears to be making a clumsy, pre-emptive effort to distance himself from Sessions. The president tweeted a series of mild rebukes of the Justice Department late Thursday and early Friday, and as he boarded the plane for his 11-day trip to Asia, Trump made similar remarks. “I’m really not involved with the Justice Department. I’d like to let it run itself,” he said, according to a White House pool report. “But honestly, they should be looking at the Democrats. They should be looking at Podesta and all of that dishonesty. They should be looking at a lot of things. And a lot of people are disappointed in the Justice Department, including me.”