On Saturday, after Rep. Adam Schiff and his fellow Democratic impeachment managers wrap up their opening statements, lawyers for Donald Trump are expected to begin their defense of the president against charges that he abused his power and obstructed Congress. The following week the Senate will debate the matter of calling witnesses, a key issue for which Democrats need four Republicans to come over to their side. At present, the GOP is confident that its colleagues across the aisle don’t have the necessary votes, with the key undecided lawmaker, Lamar Alexander, expected to ultimately stay loyal to Mitch McConnell. Given the stakes, though—if Democrats do convince four Republicans to come over to their side, it could mean hearing from people like John Bolton, who know where all the Ukraine bodies are buried—the White House is apparently leaving nothing to chance. And by leaving nothing to chance, we mean threatening anyone who crosses Trump.

According to a report from CBS News, Republicans even entertaining the idea of giving Democrats the necessary votes to call witnesses have been told, “Vote against the president, and your head will be on a pike.”

Is the White House literally threatening to decapitate lawmakers and place their heads on spikes as a warning to onlookers? While we can’t discount anything from this administration, the answer is: probably not. Instead the alleged threat is presumably more along the lines of witness intimidation and jury tampering, the likes of which one generally expects from the mafia.

This obviously isn’t the first time that people considering going against Trump’s interests have been told they might want to think twice. Last week Senator Rand Paul issued a warning to his colleagues that if “some Republicans help Democrats get witnesses and there are no witnesses for the president...the end result is a revolutionary tide against those people. I can’t imagine that [Trump] will let it go by if someone votes to bring in witnesses that his administration isn’t interested in.”

While at this point it appears unlikely that Democrats will garner the necessary votes, should they be successful, Trump’s legal team has already come up with a plan of action to silence witnesses by invoking national security concerns. That would put testimony from Bolton and maybe others in a classified setting, which would certainly look like they have something to hide, but which experts say would probably be better than the alternative. “Democrats will ask, ‘Don’t the American people deserve to know the truth?’” William Galston, a senior fellow in governance at the Brookings Institution, told the Washington Post. “On the other hand, [Republicans] may well calculate that public testimony would create uncertainties that they’re willing to go to considerable lengths to avoid.”