This article has been updated.

The House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 presidential election has reportedly ground to a halt amid growing evidence that its Republican chairman, Devin Nunes, has been coordinating with the White House to protect the president from further embarrassment.

Nunes first raised eyebrows on Capitol Hill when he broke protocol by holding a press conference to announce that he had learned from a source that Donald Trump and his associates may have been “incidentally” surveilled by the F.B.I. as part of the agency’s intelligence gathering on foreign targets. The news left Trump feeling vindicated, after F.B.I. director James Comey and National Security Agency chief Mike Rogers shot down the president’s repeated claims that he had been “wiretapped” by the previous administration. But it also left Democrats steaming: not only did Nunes run to the press rather than bring his evidence to the committee, he also briefed Trump about what he had learned—thereby communicating with a potential target of his own investigation. Later, it emerged that Nunes had met his “source” on the White House grounds, raising further suspicions that he was coordinating with the Trump administration.

Democrats were already calling on Nunes to recuse himself when The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the California congressman had canceled a hearing set to include testimony from former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates under unusual circumstances. According to the Post, the White House had previously attempted to block Yates from testifying, given that she was expected to provide testimony that would contradict the White House about the circumstances surrounding the resignation of former national security adviser Mike Flynn. When it emerged that Yates planned to testify anyway, Nunes shut down the hearing.

It seems easy enough to connect the dots. But according to reporting by The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, there is also a smoking gun:

The White House and Nunes were clearly coördinating this strategy. A few days before the hearing, Trump seemed to offer a preview of it. In an interview on Fox News, the President said that he “will be submitting things” to Nunes’s committee “very soon,” and “perhaps speaking about this next week,” adding that “you’re going to find some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks.”