WASHINGTON—Their explanations didn’t make much sense, but they were broadly consistent. For two days, over and over, U.S. President Donald Trump and the rest of his administration said he fired FBI director James Comey only at the recommendation of the deputy attorney general.

Trump conceded Thursday that they were all lying. And, in an astonishing admission, he casually acknowledged the grave allegation his surrogates had been strenuously denying: his decision was based in part on his unhappiness with the Comey-led investigation into whether his campaign associates colluded with Russian meddling in the presidential election.

“In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won,” Trump said in an interview with NBC anchor Lester Holt.

Abandoning his entire public rationale for the firing, Trump flatly told Holt that he was planning to fire Comey even before he met on Monday with deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein.

“I was going to fire regardless of recommendation,” he said. “He made a recommendation, but regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey.”

His comments deepen the credibility crisis afflicting an administration that has made lying a habit. And they call into further question the democratic legitimacy of his dismissal of a man conducting a probe with the potential to imperil his career.

Read more:Donald Trump said 213 false things in his first 100 days. Here are all of them

Until Thursday, Trump and his aides had claimed that he had acted on principle. The implausible premise was repeated by Trump’s team at press conferences and in interviews: Trump was moved to action by the concerns Rosenstein expressed to him, independently, about how Comey violated protocol in talking publicly about the investigation into Hillary Clinton last year.

Press secretary Sean Spicer’s initial statement said, “President Trump acted based on the clear recommendations of both deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.” In Trump’s own termination letter to Comey, the president said he was “accepting” a recommendation from Rosenstein and Sessions.

And in press conference Wednesday, Vice-President Mike Pence said seven separate times that Trump had merely chosen to “accept” Rosenstein’s advice.

Trump gave an entirely different explanation to Holt. Not only did he reject the claim that Rosenstein’s advice mattered, he did not cite Comey’s handling of the Clinton investigation as a significant factor at all.

Instead, he began with a gripe about Comey’s personality.

“He’s a showboat, he’s a grandstander,” Trump said. “The FBI has been in turmoil. You know that, I know that, everybody knows that.”

In another remarkable moment, Trump said he asked Comey three times to tell him whether he is under investigation himself. Comey, he said, told him, “You are not under investigation.”

The first of these instances, Trump said, came at a dinner in which Comey asked Trump to keep him in the job. Trump spokeswoman Sarah Sanders dismissed concerns about the appropriateness of the president mixing the investigation and the director’s employment in this way, saying it was not “an issue.”

Whether or not that would be proper, there was no immediate evidence that Trump’s story was actually true. Anonymous Comey associates have told U.S. media outlets that Comey never told Trump he was not being investigated, one saying to the Wall Street Journal that the idea was “literally farcical.”

Sanders faced a barrage of questions about why she and the vice-president had provided inaccurate information. She responded with evasions, mockery of reporters and Democrats, and a claim that she had not had a chance to speak to Trump before she communicated his thinking to the world.

“It was a quick-moving process,” she said. “We took the information we had, as best we had it, and got it out to the American people as quickly as we could.”

Her own credibility was called into question again by the Thursday congressional testimony of the acting FBI director, Andrew McCabe. McCabe contradicted her claim that Comey had lost the confidence of rank-and-file FBI employees.

“That is not accurate,” McCabe said.

Sanders had claimed Wednesday that she had heard from “countless” people at the FBI. She maintained Thursday that she had heard directly from a “large number” of FBI employees who were pleased with the firing, a claim that numerous experts on the bureau said was probably not true either.

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Soon after her briefing, Trump scrapped a tentatively planned visit to FBI headquarters. The White House had been informed that he was unlikely to be greeted warmly there, NBC reported.

U.S. President Donald Trump defended his firing of FBI Director James Comey on Wednesday. Trump did not mention any effect the dismissal might have on FBI and congressional investigations into contacts between his 2016 election campaign and

Trump’s interview came in the middle of a comprehensively surreal day in which he eventually reignited, on Twitter, his long-running feud with celebrity Rosie O’Donnell.

In the morning, Time and the Economist published transcripts of interviews in which the president ranted about his critics and made a variety of bizarre and inaccurate claims. At one point, he said he had invented the decades-old economic phrase “prime the pump.” At another, he called CNN host Chris Cuomo a “chained lunatic” – shortly after claiming, again, that he has stopped watching CNN.

The administration did receive some good news. McCabe’s testimony cast doubt on the claim, reported widely Wednesday, that Comey had requested more resources for the Russia probe shortly before his firing. And the Senate confirmed his chief trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, allowing him to initiate the 90-day countdown to the beginning of NAFTA renegotiation talks.

Trump told the Economist that he wants “massive” changes to NAFTA, and he again said the U.S. lumber arrangement with Canada is “terrible.” But he danced around a request for details on what he believes would constitute a fairer North American trade pact, saying only this: “Everything in NAFTA is bad.”

U.S. President Donald Trump said 213 false things in his first 100 days. Here are all of them:

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