He had to backpedal 40 minutes into his show.

Thursday night on his Fox News show, conservative commentator Sean Hannity took his roughly 3 million viewers on quite a roller coaster ride.

Hannity’s show began at 9 pm. At 8 pm, the New York Times released a blockbuster report by Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt detailing that President Trump had ordered the firing of special counselor Robert Mueller this past June.

First, Hannity claimed the Times was “trying to distract you.” Probing viewers to think about other times the publication has “gotten it wrong,” Hannity reassured his audience that he had checked in with “many of his sources.”

“They’re not confirming that tonight.”

But he spoke too soon.

Just 40 minutes later, Hannity backtracked completely: “So we have sources tonight just confirming ... that, yeah, maybe Donald Trump wanted to fire the special counsel for conflict.”

But, according to the host, viewers shouldn’t worry about it. “Does he not have the right to raise those questions?”

Apparently eager to wipe his hands of the whole debacle, the host concluded, “You know, we’ll deal with this tomorrow night,” cutting to an explanation of the “video of the day” without so much as a pause for breath.

The so-called video of the day? A literal high-speed car chase. Complete with one car slamming into another and flipping over.

We cannot make this up.