As anyone who has watched a few police procedurals knows, when subjects of interrogation change the details of their stories, it is a signal they may be lying.  Prosecutors seize on inconsistencies during trials to convince jurors that the defendant made up a story, because it is easy to keep the truth straight, but the details of lies easily confuse the liar.

And so we have Harry Reid once again altering the details of his story on how he came to look like he has been beaten up on the morning of New Year’s Day.  Michael Patrick Leahy of Breitbart summarizes the evolving story:

… on January 22, Politico, relying almost certainly upon Reid’s staff authorized by Reid, reported that “[s]ources familiar with the incident said Reid was exercising in his bathroom, with the exercise band attached to the shower door.”

In his CNBC interview, Reid adds a new detail to his story, claiming “I got hurt in my own bathroom with my wife standing there.” (emphasis added).

Last week, Senator Reid told Univision’s Jorge Ramos he attached his exercise band to “a big metal hook” in an unspecified room of his Nevada home.

In his first version of the story, Reid said, the band “broke.” In the next version he told Ramos it “slipped.”

“I was doing that [exercising with resistance bands] in my new home here in Nevada,” Reid told Ramos, “and a big metal hook that came out from the wall that was hooked there that the strap had no handle on it, slipped, spun me around, uh, about, oh I guess four feet and so I smashed my face into a cabinet so hard that uh…” (emphasis added).

Leahy and Breitbart have obtained images of the bathroom before Reid purchased the house, and unless there were renovations to a brand new bathroom, the only thing that could qualify as a hook was a circular towel rack, the sort of thing that would pull out of a wall the first time it was used as an anchor for an exercise band.

There is a strong indicator that the left senses danger here.  Jonathan Chair, a writer who once boasted during the George W. Bush presidency that he hated W, has a piece in New York Magazine mocking those who would question Reid’s story: “Obviously Terrified Harry Reid Refuses to Finger Mafia Assailants.”  Of course, assigning absolute veracity to the Senate minority leader is a risky enterprise, given the well-established fact that he lied in the Senate well in spreading the false story that Mitt Romney had failed to pay income taxes and has openly expressed no regret over the lie.  Harry Reid has forfeited any presumption of veracity, and he is becoming an embarrassment to the Democrats.

Rush Limbaugh has joined in the fun:

Rush Limbaugh gave Reid a dose of his own medicine.

Limbaugh relayed the story of “Easton Elliott” the pseudonym for a person who claims to live in Las Vegas and sets forth an alternative theory for how Reid sustained his New Year’s Day injuries.

“Elliott” first told his story to Powerline’s John Hinderaker, who relayed it to his readers on April 3.

“I might now know who did it,” Limbaugh said of Reid’s injuries.

“This man [“Easton Elliott”] wanted to talk to me about what happened to Harry Reid,” Limbaugh reported.

Limbaugh said he spoke on the phone with “Elliott” after his story first appeared at Powerline, then described “Elliott’s” claim that Harry Reid’s younger brother, Larry Reid, was the likely culprit.

You can read the full account of “Elliott’s” story on the Powerline blog here.

But Limbaugh was careful not to vouch for “Elliott’s” story.

“Hinderaker can’t vouch for it and neither can I,” Limbaugh said.

The questioning of Reid now has momentum and can’t be swept under the rug.  How long will it be until Chuck Schumer and a delegation of senior Democrats go to Reid and ask him to step down from his position as minority leader, “for health reasons”?