For a presidential candidate who doesn’t miss an opportunity to call his opponents liars, Donald Trump was particularly slippery Thursday night. During a CNN town hall in South Carolina, the Republican front-runner continued to boast that he was against the invasion of Iraq from the very beginning—and then, minutes later, admitted that he had actually supported the war before it started but that he was “totally against the war” soon after, and that it didn’t really matter anyway.

Trump has made criticism of the Iraq war a centerpiece of his campaign, railing against former president George W. Bush and, by extension, his brother Jeb, for sparking a conflict he has blamed for the rise of ISIS and the chaos in Libya and Syria. During last Saturday’s Republican debate, he went further, accusing the Bush administration of deliberately lying about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, inciting boos from the South Carolina audience. “They lied, they said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none and they knew that there were none!” he bellowed, right in poor Jeb Bush’s face. But pressed Thursday on the allegation by an upset audience member, Orrin Smith, Trump caved in a classically Trumpian way. “Well, a lot of people agree with what I said. And I’m not talking about lying, I’m not talking about not lying,” he insisted. “Nobody really knows why we went into Iraq.”

Smith asked Trump two more times if he actually believed if Bush lied, and CNN host Anderson Cooper continued to press the question four more times—“Either you believe he either lied or did not lie. Are you willing to say which?”—but Trump refused to give a definitive answer. “I don’t know what he did," he said, looking uncomfortable. "I just know it was a terrible mistake.”

He did, however, attempt to spin the unanswered question into a discussion about how right he had been about Iraq all along.

“I was against the war when it started,” he said bluntly. “I’m the one that doesn’t want [to] do this, OK? I’m the one, from 2002, 2003, said you shouldn’t be doing it,” he continued. “Don’t go in because you’re going to ruin the balance in the Middle East; you’re going to have a total imbalance; you’re going to have Iran taking over Iraq,” he claimed to have said at the time.

“Everything I said turned out to be true,” he added.

Literally minutes later, Cooper received word of a just-published BuzzFeed article revealing that in 2002, Trump had told radio host Howard Stern that he was in support of the war: “Yeah, I guess so,” he can be heard saying in an audio clip of the interview. “You know, I wish the first time it was done correctly.”

Confronted with his own words, Trump promptly dismissed them. “I mean, I could—I could have said that,” he replied to Cooper. “Nobody asked me—I wasn’t a politician. It was probably the first time anybody asked me that question.”

Trump continued to talk in circles, crafting an argument like a drunkenly constructed Jenga tower. “There are articles—I mean, there are headlines in 2003, 2004 that I was totally against the war. And actually, a couple of people in your world in terms of the pundits, said, you know, there’s definite proof in 2003, 2004 Trump was against it.”

Trump did not name those pundits, and declined to mention that the earliest recorded incident of his opposition to the Iraq war was a vague, throwaway comment made during a Vanity Fair Oscars party weeks after the invasion started. His first firm condemnation of the war came in November of 2004, more than a year after the invasion began, and long after public opinion of the war plummeted.

Trump has used his harsh condemnation of the Iraq war—a position bordering on heretical among the Republican establishment—to bludgeon Jeb for the sins of his brother, and to argue that his foresight on the issue proves his superior foreign-policy chops. But there’s a profound difference between publicly arguing against the invasion of Iraq in 2002, when disagreement with the proposed invasion was considered anti-American, and calling the war a “mess” in the middle of a Hollywood party before, as The Washington Post reported at the time, “sweeping off into the crowd” of A-listers drinking champagne.