The House Intelligence Committee has not always been a model of bipartisanship and cooperation—its Senate counterpart has traditionally been far more unified, mostly by virtue of longer term limits and different rules. But the degree to which the committee’s infighting and dysfunction has spilled into public view over the last year—through leaks, television appearances, and press conferences—has been remarkable. And it is a case study in how Russia’s election interference has only deepened divisions among the political leaders tasked with responding to it.

“I never thought it would get to this point,” said a former staffer who worked on the committee from 2005 to 2010. “When I came on board, HPSCI had gone in the ‘80s and ‘90s from being a very quiet organization, with everything done behind closed doors, to somewhat more of a public entity with the 9/11 commission. You started to see more sharp-elbowed politicians at head of these committees soon after that, and more partisan bickering. But it was very rare that that partisan bickering got out into the public.”

“It’s never been this bad,” said Mieke Eoyang, a former HPSCI subcommittee staff director who now serves as vice president for Third Way’s National Security Program. “At its most partisan, the majority and minority might have used the intelligence community to have a fight with each other, but not to denigrate the IC itself.” Schiff pushed back, however, on the premise that the committee is broken. “It’s important to recognize that even though the Russia probe suffered from a different point of view on our mission—I viewed our mission as getting to the truth of what the Russians did, the chairman viewed his mission as protecting the president—we’ve managed to compartmentalize the rest of the committee’s work,” Schiff said in an interview. “Our oversight of the agencies is done in a bipartisan way, such as with the Intelligence Authorization bill and the very difficult 702 bill. So the other work of the committee has gone on uninterrupted.” A spokeswoman for Conaway said he was not available for an interview, and declined to reply to requests for comment.

Schiff, as well as current and former staffers who spoke to me for this article—several off the record and most on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press either by the panel or by their current employers—identified a particular tipping point: Republican Chairman Devin Nunes’s late-night excursion to the White House last spring. That excursion, referred to as “the Midnight Run” among committee members and staff—triggered a chain of events that left Schiff and Nunes, as well as their respective staffs, profoundly at odds, these people said. “They used to get on really well before the Midnight Run,” said a current aide, referring to Schiff and Nunes. At least one outlet described their relationship as “something of a bromance.” Now, Nunes tweets regularly about “fake news,” “leaks from Congress,” and Democrats’ obsession with “Russia conspiracy theories.” In a recent Fox News appearance, he said he has “no faith” in Special Counsel Robert Mueller because he has not investigated the “felony” leaks coming from the intelligence community. It is not clear how Nunes knows what Mueller is or is not investigating. His spokesman did not return a request for comment.