In essence, Trump’s post says that he possessed classified documents, which he kept in cartons. This, despite his representatives’ having two months earlier told the grand jury, under oath, that he had surrendered all documents that were responsive to a May 11 subpoena demanding that he surrender any classified documents — a sworn statement provided in the course of giving the FBI 38 classified documents (which, of course, did not include what Trump now says he was keeping in cartons, among other places from which the FBI seized them on August 8).

What’s more, this seems like Trump’s zillionth version of events. He didn’t have classified documents. Then he had them, but he declassified them pursuant to a standing order that no one has produced and that some senior Trump security officials said didn’t exist. Then they were declassified because he could just pronounce them declassified, or even imagine them into declassified status . . . notwithstanding that, when he’d gotten a grand-jury subpoena demanding the production of classified documents, he surrendered what were represented to be 38 classified documents — he never said, “I already declassified them, so I do not possess any classified documents responsive to the subpoena.” Then, more recently, he suggested that if damning evidence had been found at Mar-a-Lago, such as classified documents that should not have been there, it must have been because the FBI planted them. Now, it turns out that the FBI did not plant them — they pulled them out of the cartons in which Trump stored them.

It is dizzying to try to keep track of the shifting, internally contradictory explanations. But an experienced defense lawyer would try to get through to the former president that this is what often happens in false-statements cases that the government wins. When people are telling the truth, their story tends not to change; by contrast, many shady people, who fear that they’ve been caught in misconduct, keep floating new and different stories as previously nonpublic facts get disclosed, hoping they’ll finally stumble on a story that works. Frequently, that exercise itself becomes the best evidence against them.