Oh dear. This is another speak-o, isn’t it?

Give credit to Morgen Richmond and John Sexton for digging it up. There’s a key difference between this audio and the audio Ed posted this morning, too:

Funny thing about this other "off the cuff" Gruber comment, it was part of his prepared remarks. Weird.

— Morgen Richmond (@morgenr) July 25, 2014

Gruber’s moronic excuse to TNR, that he committed a “speak-o” while rambling through a Q&A, obviously doesn’t work for this one. Which makes me wonder: Did he knowingly lie to TNR or has he somehow convinced himself that he never believed that only state exchanges would be eligible for ObamaCare subsidies? The answer doesn’t matter insofar as the quotes are damaging either way to the left’s bogus “drafting error” theory for what happened in the parts of O-Care at issue in the Halbig case, but I’m amused by how he’s painted himself into a corner now. His choices are ‘fessing up to lying, probably by admitting that yes, okay, he did at one point believe that only state exchanges would be eligible but has since changed his mind, or basically saying, “Oh yeah, I forgot about that.” Mind you, this is the guy whom the media routinely credits as having all but drafted the ObamaCare statute.

In lieu of an exit question, I’m setting the over/under on the final total of damaging Gruber soundbites to emerge at four. Place your bets.

Update: This is a non-answer.

Gruber told The New Republic [after the first video clip emerged] that he had made a mistake.

“I was speaking off-the-cuff. It was just a mistake. People make mistakes. Congress made a mistake drafting the law and I made a mistake talking about it,” Gruber told The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn. “But there was never any intention to literally withhold money, to withhold tax credits, from the states that didn’t take that step. That’s clear in the intent of the law and if you talk to anybody who worked on the law. My subsequent statement was just a speak-o—you know, like a typo.”

A second recording has surfaced showing Gruber making similar statements about subsidies not being available on federally run exchanges. Asked over email whether those remarks were a mistake, too, Gruber wrote back, “same answer.”

He wasn’t speaking off the cuff in the second clip, though. It obviously wasn’t a speak-o/typo. This is him basically saying “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”