smoking gun

Lawrence, with Sister Agnes playing His Girl Friday, obtains the smoking gun, gives the Vatican copy machine a workout and tosses the incendiary flyers to everybody at the lunch hall.

No smoking gun has surfaced to prove the alleged bribe actually occurred.

Vidal, repeating other historians’ assertions, pointed out this was “not necessarily, in those frontier days, the sign of a smoking gun — only messy male housekeeping.”

“There’s never a smoking gun, so to speak,” Mr. Pruchnicki said.

Still, one legal expert said that the defense team is likely to argue there's no smoking gun yet that undoubtedly shows Trump knew about the scheme to falsify the records.