The president’s son may have avoided an indictment from Robert Mueller, but Republicans are still worried he could be in legal jeopardy. A growing number of lawmakers are urging Donald Trump Jr. to ignore a subpoena from the Senate Intelligence Committee, which wants to re-litigate his Trump Tower meeting with meddling Russian agents. Senator Richard Burr, the Republican chair of the committee, reportedly says Jr. has ignored repeated requests over the past several months to come in for closed-door testimony, despite an earlier agreement that he would do so. Yet Donald Trump’s closest allies don’t seem to have much faith that the president’s firstborn could testify before Congress without incriminating himself. “If I were Donald Trump Jr.’s lawyer, I would tell him you don’t need to go back into this environment anymore,” Lindsey Graham recently said on Fox News. The ostensible argument is that Trump Jr. is being unfairly targeted by the Democrats and Burr, their useful tool. The subtext, however, is clear: Republicans are worried that Jr. either lied to Congress before the Mueller report, or will lie to Congress now.

What would happen in that case is unclear. Attorney General William Barr is unlikely to arrest him, and Don Jr. could always just plead the Fifth. Nevertheless, Republicans are hustling to scare Senator Burr off his high horse. Rand Paul has tweeted that Burr needs to “get the memo” that the Russia investigation is over, and John Cornyn has urged to “keep the Intelligence Committee out of politics.” Even Burr’s fellow senator from North Carolina, Thom Tillis, rebuked him on Twitter, writing that it is “time to move on & start focusing on issues that matter to Americans.”

Attempts to run interference for the princeling have been complicated by reporting in The New York Times, which suggests divergent explanations for Trump Jr.’s sudden skittishness. Whereas the president’s son has reportedly claimed that he was given assurances that he would only be called before the Senate once for open-ended questioning, back in 2017, Burr reportedly told his Senate colleagues that Jr. and his legal advisers had agreed that he would return if the Senate asked. The Times reports that Burr and Jr.’s people were working out a potential appearance as far back as December, and discussions were ongoing up until April—when the Mueller report, and its detailed description of the Trump Tower meeting, was made public. (The special counsel declined to charge Don Jr. with a crime, arguing, in effect, that he could not determine if the president’s son knew he was doing something illegal, or that the value of the information warranted a charge of conspiracy.)

Burr isn’t the only Republican senator arguing that Jr. has nothing to fear. Marco Rubio told the Times that anyone criticizing Burr has “a fundamental misunderstanding” of the committee’s work on the potential of Russian interference itself. “Our focus is different [than] Mueller,” he explained. “We’re focused on counter-intelligence and intelligence.” (Trump Jr. did not respond to the Times story alleging that he misrepresented the timeline leading up to the subpoena request.)

Most lawmakers would rather avoid a situation in which they would be forced to consider whether to hold Trump Jr. in contempt, which would require a very public Senate floor vote. They would also rather avoid a drawn-out legal battle. For some partisans, however, Trump Jr.’s dilemma has its uses. Many of the most vocal anti-Burr senators also happen to be up for re-election in 2020, and will need as much support from the president as possible. What better loyalty test for the White House than politicizing a formerly bipartisan inquiry involving the president’s son, and diminishing Congress’s oversight power in the process?

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