While the New York case was making its way through the courts, the Justice Department repeatedly made another claim that turns out to be false (or, at the very least, that the Trump administration itself now claims to be false). The ACLU brief filed on Friday lists twelve separate occasions where Trump administration lawyers claimed that “the census forms must be finalized for printing by the end of June 2019.”

Because of this claim by Trump’s Justice Department, courts processed this case on an unusually expedited basis. Among other things, the Supreme Court invoked a rarely used procedure that bypassed review by a federal appeals court and allowed the nation’s highest court to review a trial court’s decision directly.

Not long after the Trump administration lost in the Supreme Court, however, it started singing a different tune. Though Justice Department lawyers initially signaled that they were giving up the fight to defend the citizenship question, they were later contradicted by President Trump himself. On July 3, they told a federal judge that they’ve been “instructed to examine whether there is a path forward, consistent with the Supreme Court’s decision, that would allow us to include the citizenship question on the census.”