I’m not sure you’re ever going to get the smoking gun you’re looking for to make a conclusive statement here.

In lending, there’s a legal concept of disparate impact, which means even if your policy didn’t explicitly intend to harm this group of people, you implicitly / indirectly impacted them, and that also counts as a bad thing just like explicit impact.

Basically, you don’t have to prove intent, you only have to prove outcome.

…It was a roundabout analogy, but I think the same thing applies here. I don’t need the administration to say, “we did that because we don’t like him.” There is enough impact for me to conclude culpability, regardless of whether I can prove intent.

(Edit: maybe a better concept here is circumstantial evidence)