When you lied that you were almost done with the task and 3 days later:

The joke is you got fired? That's brutal.

sounds hostile

I plead guilty.

Usually you can get away by saying someone denied your request because these kind of documents tend to be shared by higher ups who don't really understand the mechanics of access control, and thus no one will raise more than half an eyebrow.

But yeah, next time, check you have all prerequisites covered before procrastinating 😜