At this point, most people reserving judgment about bin Salman’s involvement in the killing—of which there are few!—would probably be comfortable informing the prince that he had a good run with the denials, but the jig is up, particularly given that words to the effect of “the deed [is] done” were also uttered on the call, which Turkish officials believed was placed to one of the prince’s aides. But apparently, the Trump administration is not ready to do that!

John R. Bolton, the White House national-security adviser, said that while he had not listened to the tape, he had been told it did not directly implicate Prince Mohammed. “That’s not the conclusion that I think the people who heard it have come to,” Mr. Bolton told reporters on Wednesday at a briefing in Singapore.

Meanwhile, that’s the conclusion literally everyone else has come to. While Turkish officials have said the audio does not conclusively implicate bin Salman, former and current intelligence officials who spoke with The New York Times say there will probably never be evidence that does exactly that, noting that “it is rare that all of the pieces of a complex puzzle like Mr. Khashoggi’s killing would ever be available.” “A phone call like that is about as close to a smoking gun as you are going to get,” Bruce O. Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer now at the Brookings Institution, told the Times. “It is pretty incriminating evidence.” But of course, as representative Adam Schiff, who’s expected to take over as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, pointed out, the Trump administration has a vested interest in being able to claim their close, personal pal knew nothing. “The Trump family and the president have built up such an overwhelming reliance on the crown prince,” he told the Times. “The relationship is now, in their view, too big to fail.”