The public ATF firearm/toolmark examination was inconclusive: the examiner could neither identify nor exclude the recovered rifle as the source of the fragments she examined.

Direct sworn testimony, contemporaneously reported by multiple outlets, and consistent with how the discipline reports damaged- fragment comparisons.

Direct sworn testimony, corroborated by the litigation history of how the result surfaced (KRK-E035) and consistent with the discipline's own account of damaged-fragment comparison (KRK-E012).

Direct sworn testimony, corroborated by how the result reached the public (KRK-E035) and by the judge's own characterization in the contempt ruling (KRK-E034), and consistent with the discipline's account of damaged-fragment comparison (KRK-E012).

Direct sworn testimony, corroborated by the litigation history of how the result became public (KRK-E035), and consistent with the discipline's own account of damaged-fragment comparison (KRK-E012).

Sworn preliminary hearing testimony directly confirms the ATF examination ended with an inconclusive result, explicitly noting the fragments could neither be identified to nor excluded from the suspect rifle. This conforms to standard forensic outcomes for damaged fragments, though the complete ATF lab report has not been published.

Live-blog transcripts and AP coverage of the ATF toolmark examiner’s testimony consistently characterize her conclusion as inconclusive: she neither identified nor excluded the recovered rifle as the source of the fragments. No contrary laboratory document or testimony is presented in the file. The only caveat is that the full written ATF report is not public, but there is no indication that it would differ in characterization from the testimony summarized under oath.

Contemporaneous multi-outlet coverage of the preliminary hearing records the examiner's result as inconclusive — neither identification nor exclusion — and a later contempt ruling recounts the same laboratory outcome as the subject of a media fight between those two selective phrasings. NIST's description of firearm/toolmark comparison as expert judgment without numeric strength makes an inconclusive result on damaged metal unsurprising rather than suspicious. Strongest opposing consideration: the examiner's full written laboratory report has not been released, so the public characterization is mediated by courtroom reporting rather than the primary lab document.

Both halves are in the hearing record from the same day: the examiner could not conclusively identify the fragments to the rifle, and the report stated the fragments could not be excluded as having been fired from it. The pairing is what makes this established rather than merely reported — each half independently rebuts one of the two circulating misreadings. The strongest opposing consideration is that the public knows this through courtroom reporting rather than the laboratory document itself, and the several outlets covering it are not independent channels; but the prosecution and defense filings both characterize the result the same way, which is meaningful adversarial corroboration.