Waiting until two hours before a court’s deadline of noon on Friday to answer an unsealing order in a case brought by the media to reveal the identities of the three suretors who paid former Brazilian drag queen Congressman George Santos $500,000 bond after he was indicted on 13 federal felonies last month, Santos’s lawyers on Friday filed their appeal, CBS’s Scott MacFarlane reports.

“Defendant has essentially publicly revealed that the suretors are family members and not lobbyists, donors or others seeking to exert influence over the Defendant,” the lawyers wrote in the appeal, which obviously isn’t saying they are family members, because that would be lying to a federal court if it turns out they are not. Lawyers don’t like doing that. The other problem here is that Santos also refused to identify them to the House Ethics Committee and, while we don’t know much of anything about how the Ethics Committee’s procedures work, we would have to think that there would be some way for Santos to privately identify these suretors to the committee leadership.

Or even just the Republicans, like a mini-Stennis Compromise. We’d probably still be suspicious if another Republican in the House vouched for Santos to say “I’ve seen the wire transfers for the bond, they really are relatives of Santos who wish to remain anonymous,” but that would still go much further than this very lawyerly-written assertion in the appeal for an admitted fucking liar.