Principle 05 of 07
The Public Record Standard
What the documentary record supports, you can say. What it doesn’t support, you cannot — regardless of how compelling the pattern.
This is not a limitation. It is the source of the methodology’s power. A claim built on documentary evidence is defensible, citable, and durable. A claim built on inference alone is vulnerable to the first simple explanation that comes along.
Primary documents
These are the load-bearing sources — records produced by an institution or process whose ordinary function is to leave a trace:
- Legislative and regulatory records (voting records, oversight reports, hearing testimony)
- Financial disclosures (lobbying registrations, FEC filings, corporate filings, SEC records)
- Court records and legal proceedings
- Inspector General reports and findings
- Declassified government documents (NARA, IWG, FOIA releases)
- Corporate and foundation histories, property registry chains
Secondary sources
Archived journalism, contemporaneous accounts, and oral histories can corroborate, contextualize, or direct attention to a primary document — but they are the output of someone else’s methodology, not raw record. Use them to find the document. The document is what holds the finding up.
The record is sometimes built, not found
The public record is not a neutral repository — it is what interested parties chose, or were compelled, to release. Much of what now sits in NARA was secret until subpoena, legislation, or litigation forced it into the open. The Church Committee did not draw on a pre-existing public record on COINTELPRO; it brought that record into being. The Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act did the same for postwar intelligence recruitment.
The discipline is therefore not “only cite what is already public.” It is: the conclusion must rest on a specific document — including ones that the investigation itself surfaces through FOIA, litigation, declassification, or careful archival work.
Documents are themselves curated
Even primary documents reflect the choices of the institution that produced them. Redactions remove what they remove. Filings disclose what regulation requires and no more. The discipline is to know what kind of record you’re holding and what it can and cannot support — not to treat any document as neutral by virtue of being a document.
The discipline
At every stage of Phase Two, the investigator must be able to point to a specific document. “The record suggests” is not sufficient. “Document X, dated Y, shows Z” is.
Where to actually go to find those documents — and how to compel ones that aren’t yet public — is the subject of the Tools & Sources page.
