Montgomery Blair Sibley, a former attorney for “D.C. madam” Deborah Jeane Palfrey, said Tuesday that one of his three ex-wives, two of his many ex-girlfriends and a close friend living abroad have CDs containing call records that could upend the presidential race.

If anything happens to him, he said, they would make sure the escort service records are widely distributed.

Sibley previously claimed he had stored the records on four servers around the world, and that a hidden website’s link would be automatically sent to reporters if he did not reset a 72-hour countdown clock. He now says that’s untrue.

The eccentric litigator insists he did not lie to media outlets, including U.S. News, when he claimed the records were already online and that “there’s a link right now, that if you had, you would have access to the records.” Instead, he says, he told an imaginative half-truth.

“Everyone assumed I meant computer servers. I meant people who serve me,” he says.

Still, the development adds further uncertainty to whether Sibley has the bombshell he claims or whether he has pulled off a successful hoax that’s titillated national TV anchors and given news websites millions of pageviews.

Sibley is seeking court permission to release two sets of records covered by a 2007 gag order: a set of raw phone records with an estimated 5,000 unique numbers and a Verizon Wireless subpoena response he says contains names, addresses and Social Security numbers of 815 of those callers.

The Supreme Court’s justices will discuss Friday whether to order a lower court to consider Sibley’s request to modify the gag order. Chief Justice John Roberts refused a request to intervene before Sibley appealed to Justice Clarence Thomas, whose referral of the matter to the full court may be intended to prevent sequential solicitation of justices.

Sibley says he may risk jail by naming names if courts don’t allow him to release information, claiming voters are blindly casting ballots in the presidential race.

Sibley disclosed his deception about a kill-switch controlled hidden website during a meeting at the National Press Club where people shared theories on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and pondered whether recent terrorist attacks were “false flag” operations by “deep state” actors.

More than a dozen well-dressed people sat around a long table discussing whether the father of Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, current contender for the GOP presidential nomination, was involved in Kennedy’s death. A speaker said that was untrue. Another confidently attributed to a CIA source, however, a claim that former President George H.W. Bush was involved.

Sibley spoke before the conversation turned to eight alien races the government may be hiding from the public.

Though his recent claims captivated the nation, they failed to hold the attention of the group meeting in a secluded room accessible only by walking through the bar kitchen on the top floor of the press club.

Some attendees held side conversations as Sibley talked. He passed around a single eight-page printout of names – some quite prominent – believed to be associated with already-released Palfrey records. The list named TV personalities, judges and elected officials -- most if not all previously unnamed in reporting about the escort service -- but only made it halfway around the table before being forgotten.

Though his description of unreleased records’ whereabouts has changed, it remains possible that Sibley has something damning in the call logs. Records he released in 2007 have time gaps, and those records did publicly expose prominent people, including the then-director of the U.S. Agency for International Development and Sen. David Vitter, R-La.

A previous effort to fact-check Sibley’s claim that there is a presidential election bombshell yielded uncertainty about what the information might be.

Sibley said the bombshell is contained specifically in the Verizon subpoena response. But Dan Moldea, an author and private investigator who worked on the Palfrey case, said he was certain four of the five remaining presidential candidates, with the exception of Cruz, were not on the list, though he said he destroyed his copy of the document.

A former researcher for Palfrey who remains close to Sibley, Matt Janovic, said he still had a copy of the subpoena response and that he did not see an obvious connection to Cruz.

The gag order Sibley is seeking to modify was imposed after he threatened to release the records in an unsuccessful effort to gain leverage with the Justice Department.

In January then-U.S. District Judge Richard Roberts refused Sibley’s request to file a motion for the gag order to be lifted. Roberts, who resigned shortly after when he was sued for sex he admits having with an underage witness in a case he prosecuted decades ago, questioned whether Sibley had a right to possess the records, given that Palfrey had fired him from her trial.

Sibley, who appealed to the D.C. Circuit federal appeals court but hasn’t heard back, says he does have a right to keep the records because, he says, he was retained to work on a criminal appeal, represented Palfrey’s mother and was working on Palfrey’s civil lawsuit at the time of her death from apparent suicide in May 2008, two weeks after her conviction on various charges.

It’s unclear if a court would be willing to find Sibley in contempt if he did distribute the records to four other people, as he claimed Tuesday to have done. The 2007 gag order says that Palfrey "and her agents and attorneys ... shall not release, further distribute, or otherwise provide to any person or organization the phone records" of Palfrey or her business.