The Democrats almost got this right. On Wednesday, they shredded what little credibility Bill Barr had left during a five-hour hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee that, at times, bordered on a cross examination. By the end of his testimony, Barr’s carefully manicured disdain gave way to thinly veiled wrath. Pushed in the hearing’s closing minutes by Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal—who asked about the just-released letter from Robert Mueller critical of the attorney general’s handling of the special counsel’s report on Russian interference—Barr finally snapped. “The letter’s a bit snitty, and I think it was written by one of his staff people,” he croaked.

It was, as The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake wrote, a slip-up. Barr had spent the day claiming that Mueller hadn’t been mad at him at all, but was instead concerned about the media coverage of Barr’s controversial summary of the report. The “snitty” comment let the cat out of the bag. Barr had been caught spinning—the text of the letter from Mueller, moreover, contained zero references to media coverage of the summary.

That wasn’t the only instance where Democrats caught the attorney general misleading Congress. Barr was also called out for previously testifying that he “didn’t know” what Mueller thought of the summary conclusions Barr drew from the report—even though the just-barely former special counsel had sent two letters objecting to those conclusions two weeks earlier. Barr also appears to have lied when he told Kamala Harris that he didn’t know of any instances in which the president or his allies suggested the attorney general investigate Trump’s perceived political enemies. Hours after the hearing, The New York Times revealed that President Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, had pressed Barr to look into dealings between Joe Biden’s son and a Ukrainian oligarch.

The AG’s relentless spinning pushed some congressional Democrats to call him a liar and demand his resignation, a significant escalation from their previous treatment of administration officials—there is some talk now of impeaching Barr.