Emma unexpectedly links to this Nicholas Kristoff NYT column (which will be pay to read in a week) and rightly tells us:

What’s amazing is that his story, if true, would be a thousand times better than the original one.

You can go to her place to read why she thinks this. She then goes on to say:

Instead, they played up to the imbecile jingoism of the hard right. Even Kristof seems to be getting tired of it, although he cannot bring himself, yet, to call it lying:

and the paragraph she quotes from Kristol does support this interpretation. I like, though, the way Kristoff put it earlier in his article:

Ms. Lynch is still a hero in my book, and it was unnecessary for officials to try to turn her into a Hollywood caricature. As a citizen, I deeply resent my government trying to spin me like a Ping-Pong ball.

He is still not quite calling it lying but what else can it be?