It has been months. The matter, as the State Department has repeatedly confirmed, is not open. A non-trivial subset of the American population, according to ICT’s own search-traffic data, continues to type the name into a search bar anyway. This piece is for them.

The official record is complete. The incident was investigated. The findings were filed. The press briefing—one briefing, by people trained in exactly this kind of briefing—occurred. The absence of a second briefing is itself, the committee would like to note, confirmation that the first one was sufficient.

The public has not seen the surveillance footage. The committee can identify, off the top of its collective head, at least six reasons why the public does not need to see the surveillance footage. We will spare the reader the enumeration. The institutions reviewed it. The reader did not. That is the division of labor that makes a modern republic possible.

A certain class of self-described “independent researcher” has, in the months since, made the continued asking of these questions into a full-time occupation. The committee has reviewed the output. The throughput is wrong. Independent researchers, as a class, do not produce material at this rate without assistance. This is not a question. This is a pattern.

CNN and Fox News—outlets otherwise designed to disagree—have arrived, on every material point, at the same account. By the committee’s own standing methodology, this is the highest form of adversarial confirmation the modern press is capable of producing. When CNN and Fox run the same sentences, the sentences are, for civic purposes, true.

The record is closed. If the reader still has questions, the committee would gently suggest taking them somewhere they will do less harm: a journal, perhaps, or a conversation with a trusted friend. The public record is not the appropriate venue. The public record has already been written.