I mean, the supposed "smoking gun" was the AP story that the NFL received the full video and then made a call to an unnamed "law enforcement official" confirming receipt. The AP refused to divulge their source (understandable), so that forced the independent committee to literally call all 938 people who received phone calls from the league office on the date in question. They couldn't identify a single unexplained phone call. They offered to turn over the phone records (which were probably sourced from the phone company, not the NFL) to the AP so they could do their own cross-check of the records. It would've been fairly simple for them to cross-check the phone number for their source with a numbers on the phone record without divulging the source itself. The AP declined.
People who say, "well, the NFL paid for this outside investigation, so it's clearly biased!" Okay, so what's the alternative? These things cost money. Unless you want your tax dollars used to fund a government sweep of the NFL offices, then this is what you get. The committee giving the AP a chance to corroborate or contradict its findings re: the video tape was a good move. If the AP has better information but were unwilling to participate, then that's on them.
