Newly released internal FBI and Justice Department emails show two senior career prosecutors in 2019, during the first Trump administration, repeatedly discouraged an FBI agent from opening a criminal investigation into whether Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee improperly concealed payments that funded the Steele dossier.

The records were made public Thursday by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and include an FBI Electronic Communication dated July 2019 and email exchanges from June 5–21, 2019, involving Richard Pilger, then head of the DOJ Public Integrity Section’s election-crimes unit, and J.P. Cooney, who at the time served as chief of public corruption at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. Together, Pilger and Cooney advised against opening any investigation, according to their communications.