Newly appointed White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, eager to prove his worth, threw himself into the administration’s undulant line of cross-communication with gusto. Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, he casually contradicted Sanders by saying that, actually, the president had not decided whether to sign the measure. “You’ve got to ask President Trump that,” he said. “It’s my second or third day on the job. My guess is that he’s going to make that decision shortly.” Later, he added: “He hasn’t made the decision yet to sign that bill one way or another.”

Scaramucci also addressed The Washington Post’s report that the president has been exploring the possibility of pardoning himself, and his associates, in light of the ongoing, parallel investigations into Russian collusion with his campaign. (The report was neatly supplemented by Trump himself, who, in a boorish demonstration of the scope of his powers, announced via Twitter that “all agree the U. S. President has the complete power to pardon.”) “I’m in the Oval Office with the president last week; we’re talking about that,” Scaramucci said, this time on Fox. “He brought that up. He said, but he doesn't have to be pardoned. There’s nobody around him that has to be pardoned. He was just making the statement about the power of pardons.”

He rounded off his weekend by clumsily confirming the fears that are driving this bill through: that Trump is not taking the Russia threat seriously. “If the Russians actually hacked this situation and spilled out those e-mails, you would never have seen it, you would have never had any evidence of them,” he quoted the president as saying, noting that, despite U.S. intelligence agencies confirming that Russia state hackers broke into Clinton-linked e-mail accounts, Trump’s still not convinced that they interfered in the election. “Maybe they did it, maybe they didn’t do it,” Scaramucci said, enigmatically.

Whether or not allegations of Russian collusion are “fake news,” the sanctions issue is quite real. Scaramucci’s precede a week in which Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort are all set to be grilled by congressional investigators about their meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer, which was ostensibly about sanctions, but actually took place in the hope of scoring damaging information about Hillary Clinton. (The committee will presumably be interested in whether the confluence of the two, otherwise unrelated, topics suggested a potential quid pro quo.) The question of U.S. sanctions on Russia also cropped up during Trump’s second, undisclosed meeting with Putin at the G20 in Germany, where the two reportedly exchanged pleasantries before turning to the issue of “adoptions”—shorthand for the restrictions Moscow placed on American adoptions of Russian children in retaliation for U.S. sanctions in the Magnitsky Act. Those and other sanctions have been a sharp point of contention between the two countries for years, particularly after President Obama tightened the screws in response to Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and intervention in Eastern Ukraine. Before he left office, Obama also expelled 35 Russian diplomats and confiscated two Russian compounds in the U.S. as punishment for intervention in the election.

In the Trump administration, the barbed issue of Russian sanctions has taken on a strange, symbolic weight, alluding not so much to the government’s willingness to inflict punishment, but its hesitancy to. This bill will be the first time that Congress, dominated by Trump’s own party, have turned on him in a major matter, and can be seen as a measure of the toll Russia has had on his presidency so far. It is also the first time that Democrats and Republicans have joined together in such a public way since Trump took office. Such collaboration should be a troubling sign for a president who has demanded complete loyalty. The G.O.P. may have circled the wagons to defend Trump, but they are not so far gone that they won’t curb his powers if they are forced to take sides against Putin. Even partisanship has its limits.