Let’s make note of this moment: The No. 2 elected official in America publicly proclaimed his readiness to take a polygraph test to verify his loyalty to the president. Imagine Joe Biden strapping on a blood-pressure cuff for Barack Obama, or Dick Cheney wearing velcro rings to measure his pulse for George W. Bush.

Pence said on Face the Nation that he was positive the op-ed didn’t come from someone on his staff, even without administering lie-detector tests. “I don’t have to ask them,” he said. “I know their character.”

The host, Margaret Brennan, also asked the vice president whether he’d ever been in a conversation about using the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to remove President Trump from office. (Another moment to take note of.) “No, never. And why would we be?” Pence said before pivoting to tout the administration’s accomplishments.

Christie took a different tack on ABC’s This Week, where the former governor and Trump-campaign surrogate is now a network contributor. Wearing a bright-pink tie and looking into the camera with a thousand-yard stare, Christie seemed to be performing for the president, whose 18-month-old administration has yet to include him. He argued that the op-ed’s author couldn’t really be a senior official, since Cabinet members and other top officials have issued denials. (CNN has a list of op-ed deniers, updated as of Saturday.) He seemed to be quibbling over the definition of senior, which could plausibly apply to hundreds of administration officials.

President Trump, in comments and in a one-word tweet last week, has posed the question of whether the author committed treason. Federal law defines treason as going to war against the United States or giving aid to its enemies. Several hosts asked administration officials how the anonymous op-ed could possibly match that description.

When asked by Chuck Todd on Meet the Press, the senior counselor and veteran spinmeister Kellyanne Conway offered impossible-to-disprove hypotheticals: “How do we know they haven’t promised other things? How do we know they’re not taking other documents?” When Todd asked how there could be any broken laws for prosecutors to investigate, she replied, “It depends. There could be, and there could not be.” But Conway also said, “Nobody’s investigating the op-ed.”

Pence didn’t defend the idea that anonymous public dissent could constitute treason, but he said the op-ed was an “assault on American democracy” because it showed a government official trying to thwart the will of an elected president. Though Pence chided former President Obama for publicly criticizing his successor in a speech Friday, Obama had voiced a similar view of anonymous Trump administration officials promising a quiet resistance. “That’s not how our democracy is supposed to work,” Obama said in the same speech. “These people aren’t elected. They are not accountable.”