“I remember we were scrambling for a speaker—and I didn’t make an ask to Senator Sanders, but somehow his people got wind that we were looking for a speaker, and they came to us and offered to speak,” Kilchenstein, who’s no longer the county chair but backed Senator Michael Bennet in the state’s primary this year, told me. “It struck me that he came down to this group three hours away from Burlington to speak to us, and secondly, he gave a very animated and rousing speech, which was beyond the norm for your usual county-barbecue speeches.”

“It seemed like he had an objective,” Kilchenstein said. “He wasn’t there as a courtesy as much as he showed up with a message.”

Read: The hidden history of Sanders’s plot to primary Obama

According to other internal emails among Obama’s reelection-campaign staffers, they’d already caught notice, on August 2, of Sanders coming to the event. “Check out the special guest,” one wrote, noting Sanders. Half an hour later came a reply from another aide: “The Cheshire County Democrats are in the process of lining him up too.” That was for a spaghetti-dinner fundraiser a few weeks later. Attending these sorts of events is one thing that potential candidates for president do to test the waters, get their names out there, and try out their stump speeches.

“When I spoke to folks in New Hampshire, this was very much a real threat. We looked out for news of his movements in the state,” said one mid-level Obama reelection aide who was in touch with New Hampshire activists, and asked for anonymity to discuss the internal conversations. “Remember, it was a weak moment in the reelection campaign. No politician accidentally goes to New Hampshire or Iowa—and folks in New Hampshire know that.”

The Obama campaign didn’t send someone in the end. But it did start hiring and deploying staff specifically to reassure activists on the ground who were getting nervous—and to gather information about the moves Sanders was making, several Obama aides said.

Since my story last week detailing that top Obama campaign officials had to ask then–Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to speak to Sanders—twice—to stop him from getting into a primary race against Obama, Sanders and his aides have repeatedly denied that he was interested in running. “I did not give any consideration to running for president of the United States until 2015,” Sanders said in a CNN town hall on Monday night, responding to the article. Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, Jim Messina, and top adviser David Plouffe confirmed the story on the record. Sanders said that people could ask Reid or fellow Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, and that they’d deny that Sanders had talked about running. But I did ask Reid and Leahy about this last week in reporting the story, and neither of them denied it. (Reid eventually issued a deliberately cryptic statement not commenting on the conversations but saying he was glad there was no primary challenge. Leahy’s spokesperson didn’t comment at all.) Sanders last Thursday called Obama an “icon” in an interview with CNN, but has not explained what changed over the nine years from that summer of 2011, when he spoke of “deep disappointment” with Obama in an interview on a progressive radio show.