One of the biggest problems with Donald Trump’s desire to reopen the country ASAP is the fact that the United States does not currently have a robust testing (or tracing) regimen in place to determine who is and who isn’t sick with the novel coronavirus. Of course, that hasn’t stopped the president from lying about the country’s testing capacity at nearly every turn, from claiming in March that “anybody” who needed a test could get one to busting out the whopper last week that the U.S. has performed more tests than every country in the world combined. Not surprisingly, the lies continued on Tuesday, when Trump told reporters that the government would be able to run 5 million tests a day “very soon.” But in this particular instance we got a real-time fact-check from one of his own officials.

Speaking to Time magazine shortly before Trump’s news briefing, Admiral Brett Giroir, assistant secretary of health who is in charge of the government’s testing response, said “There is absolutely no way on Earth, on this planet or any other planet, that we can do 20 million tests a day, or even 5 million tests a day.” While Giroir was responding to a study from Harvard University, which concluded the U.S. would need to run at least 5 million tests a day by early June and 20 million by late July in order to safely reopen the economy, it’s almost as though some small part of him knew, on a subconscious level, that Trump would come out with one of his most absurd lies yet and was trying to head things off.

Unfortunately, our pathological liar in chief didn’t get the memo in advance of yesterday’s press conference, though having since been made aware of it he’s been able to course correct by claiming he never said the thing he said in full view of cameras and reporters, as is his wont: