A conventional starting point in disclosure games is that messages can be verified by evidence. Yet, as frequently encountered in political debate, when the same evidence is consistent with multiple hypothetical assertions, its disclosure never conclusively verifies any of them. The paper's main result is that in such settings, a receiver should optimally ignore hypothetical supersets and accept evidence at face value. This principle extends to equilibrium in strategic disclosure games, both with and without sender competition. Yet with alternating disclosure—revealing evidence one piece at a time—senders can coordinate on concealment. Finally, the paper maps accepted evidence into probability spaces, situating the results within a broader theoretical framework for belief formation.

How do state actors, often unaccountable for their words, use the news media to persuade the public? To answer the question, I examine a communication model where to reach a receiver, a sender must first pass the scrutiny of a gatekeeper. I show that the sender can use the gatekeeper to pass self-serving, credible information. However, the gatekeeper may compel the sender to disclose undesirable facts. The sender can eliminate that risk and extract the optimal persuasion payoffs from the game by simultaneously releasing the messages to various, more and less scrutinous gatekeepers.

Why do legislatures in democracies sometimes fail to represent the majority on morally charged policies? To answer the question, I develop a formal model in which coalition agreements—each specifying a division of a budget and an agenda of indivisible moral issues—compete for a majority in the legislature. The main proposition is that under high elite polarization, when the cost of compromise is great, competition favors agreements that enact the minority view, precisely on the one issue on which the large majority agrees. When polarization is very low, opinion congruence can be achieved, but a minimal majority controls the budget. The results hold for a broad class of inter-coalition allocation rules and electorate-legislature opinion alignment. Simulations illustrate the comparative statics, and a stylized case from the Israeli Knesset demonstrates the mechanism.