At first blush, the news about U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions looked bad. At second blush, it looked worse. At third blush, I got tired of blushing and ran outside to cool my face with fresh snow. But then things started to settle. With most Russia-related stories these days, especially ones in The New York Times and The Washington Post, the best initial reaction is heavy skepticism. That way you aren’t surprised when embarrassing editorial disclaimers appear above stories that Russia hacked a Vermont utility or spread “fake news” via dozens of U.S. websites from Drudge to Truthdig, and you read past the headline of stories like “Trump Aides Had Contact With Russian Intelligence.”

On the other hand, lies are lies, and lies under oath are even bigger lies, regardless of what they’re about—Russia or height or size of fish. So the question is simple: did Sessions perjure himself, and was some sort of cover-up going on?

To back up for a second, here is an overview of the controversy. On Wednesday night, The Washington Post reported the following: “Then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) spoke twice last year with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Justice Department officials said, encounters he did not disclose when asked about possible contacts between members of President Trump’s campaign and representatives of Moscow during Sessions’s confirmation hearing to become attorney general.”

So what gives? Former president George W. Bush chief White House ethics lawyer Richard W. Painter has taken to The New York Times opinion pages to call it a “bombshell of a story” and suggest that, in the past, anyone testifying so inaccurately “would have been fired and had his or her security clearances revoked immediately, and probably also would have been criminally prosecuted.” By contrast, Senator Ted Cruz has called it a “nothing burger.” He’s a man with rhetorical gifts.

Originally, when writing this story, I intended to offer three hypotheses for what could have happened: (1) Sessions was colluding with Moscow and trying to hide it. (2) Sessions wasn’t colluding with Moscow, but he forgot about his meetings with Kislyak. (3) Sessions wasn’t colluding with Moscow, but decided to lie about contacts with Russians.

I dismissed Hypothesis 1. If you’re conspiring with Moscow, then you at least try to be sneaky about things. Maybe meeting your co-plotter in your Senate office is so obvious that it’s a brilliant fake, but—really. I was more partial to Hypothesis 2, especially since Senator Claire McCaskill just tweeted out today that during her years in the Senate she had had “No call or meeting w/Russian ambassador. Ever.”—only to be revealed to have had such interactions after all. But Sessions also submitted a Questions for the Record filing, or QFR, and such documents are completed with great deliberation and care. There’s no excuse for an omission or falsehood in that format. So that left Hypothesis 3: that Sessions was trying to avoid feeding perceptions of Russian coziness and therefore denied something that had happened.

Then I reviewed the tape. And now I dismiss all three.

Who asked what, and how did they ask it? I looked up the QFR that Sessions submitted. Here was the Russia question as posed by Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy: “Several of the President-Elect’s nominees or senior advisers have Russian ties. Have you been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after election day?” Here was Sessions’ answer: “No.”