The Republican party needs to have plausible deniability. In the conservative playbook, it’s okay to repeat things that they know for a fact are untrue, or to tell a lie of omission to further their agenda, because they can always walk it back at the point in time which they are receiving blowback by saying they didn’t know it wasn’t true or that they didn’t have all the facts at hand. Assuming that the lie doesn’t manifest itself into truth or that there are enough people who care enough about the real truth to bother fact checking it at all to the point where it would necessarily generate any kind of controversy.

This was Vance saying the quiet part out loud, probably by accident, and his pivot was not convincing at all.