So your view—like others posting here—is your ATF should say nothing at all until she has proof beyond a doubt that you are indeed a hottie? That'd be no fun.
I am not so stuck on formal proof in personal matters and prefer my life, especially my sex-life, to move a tad faster than an institution as industrial, inefficient and dysfunctional as the criminal courts (whose life and death power in law equates to the dead-certain safety precautions appropriate for a hooker with full-blown AIDs). I'm pretty sure I've stayed well shy of any encounter that dangerous.
'Preponderance of evidence', 'balance of probabilities', and 'probable cause' are lesser standards of evidence that our legal systems find quite functional in decion-making, and that's just the law. Unless I've missed something no legal system has yet concerned itself (except perhaps discreetly and privately) with the Fords.
As a bunch of ordinary folks, consuming product of our media, free, and unregulated except by libel, slander, obscenity and national security laws we get to derive whatever comfort, opinion or disquiet we each of us may choose from whatever they may choose to say.
Just like you with your ATF.
As I said wise people are waiting; fools are reading the Star as if it was a charge from a prosecutor, and complaining that it should be as thoroughly proven. You of course know that even Crown Attorneys are not held to the 'beyond reasonable doubt' standard when a charge is laid ('reasonable possibility of conviction', I believe is all they need).
The Star did just what it should, kept it's ears to the ground, came up with a story, and did what they could to verify and describe it accurately while it was still news.
Wise folks wait for facts to make serious decisions; with the Ford's that'll be in 2014 for most of us. Lotsa time even to retract oour over-quick opinions. But we are as entitled to form them as the media are to report what they know, although we might be wise not to jump to dogmatic overstatement.
But—never suggesting overstatement is involved—for your example, when was wisdom any part of a hottie's dealings with their ATF?
