And the improbable claims were only starting. For example, Trump Jr. has claimed that he was annoyed that rather than deliver good dirt on Hillary Clinton, the lawyer with whom he met had wanted to talk about Russian adoptions. He claims he left the meeting and more or less forgot about it. That account requires believing that Trump Jr. did not recall the meeting—or mention it to anyone on the campaign—even when the Democratic National Committee subsequently announced it had been hacked by entities it believed to be Russian intelligence, even when Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s email was hacked, even as accusations that Russia backed Trump’s candidacy became more and more common through the fall and since the election, and even after four major U.S. intelligence agencies offered the conclusion that Russia had interfered in the election to help the Trump campaign.

In addition, even as the Trump campaign fought what most people (including the president) believed was a losing battle for the presidency, neither Trump Jr. nor any other staffer thought to return to the Russians and see if they had any other dirt, even though top officials clearly had no ethical reservations about accepting help from Moscow.

While it has been somewhat overshadowed by the question of opposition research, it’s also difficult to believe that Trump Jr. would simply have let it slip his mind that he was told, in writing, that the Russian government supported his father’s candidacy—unless he and others on the Trump campaign already had some reason to believe that or had been previous informed it was the case. (Either way, it makes Trump Jr.’s July 24, 2016, CNN appearance, in which he called the accusation that Russia backed his father “so phony” and “disgusting” seem dishonest.)

Furthermore, this version requires people to believe that Kushner didn’t recall the meeting, either, even as he reportedly discussed setting up a back channel to allow Trump staffers to communicate with Russia using Russian equipment, circumventing U.S. channels, after the election. It also requires that neither Kushner nor Trump Jr. recalled the meeting after Attorney General Jeff Sessions acknowledged he had not disclosed meetings with the Russian ambassador to the Senate, and after National-Security Adviser Michael Flynn was forced to resign for lying about his discussions with the ambassador to Vice President Pence (although he may also have lied to the FBI).

When Trump Jr. released the emails on Tuesday, he claimed he was doing so in the name of transparency. You shouldn’t really get credit for transparency when you’re just beating a newspaper by minutes, as Shep Smith pointed out, and yet there were plenty of defenders willing to take up that line of argument. As Ed Rogers wrote in a harshly but fairly maligned column, “In reality, Trump Jr.’s emails show he has nothing to hide.” Buying this requires one to believe that although Trump Jr. did not tell the truth in the first three explanations he proffered, the fourth was the one in which he had told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.