Evidence Laundering. The failure mode where a conclusion appears grounded because it cites material, but the cited material was not eligible to be evidence: it was stale, unverified, unauthorized, uncited, or never admitted through a governed boundary.
Evidence laundering is worse than ordinary ungrounded confidence because it borrows the visual form of rigor. The answer has links, snippets, or retrieved context, but those artifacts do not prove that the sources were approved, fresh, licensed, accessible to the actor, or preserved for replay.
It often appears as citation theater: citations are visible, but they did not actually make the conclusion admissible or reproducible.
The control is governed evidence with explicit evidence eligibility: evidence must carry provenance, freshness, approval, citability, sensitivity labels, and a preserved derivation before it can ground a consequential conclusion.