"Sorry, James. I'm just worn out. I didn't mean to be short with you." Maybe he was taking things the wrong way, but everything James said seemed to ring with tones of 'why are you such a moron.'
"To be honest, I'm sort of following your mothers lead when it comes to the press." Mainly because it was the whole reason she was divorcing him so he thought this was kind of her deal. "She wants to release something to them. Maybe it will shut them up a bit to have a statement directly from her."
A man could dream, right?
Listening to his son's request, he tried to run that through a 'how can I say that without hurting your mother's feelings' filter in his mind. "Is there anything specific about the way she writes you that strikes you as fake?" He'd never really gotten that impression from her owls, but what did he know? "So I can explain a bit."