I prescribe literally zero truth value to what Sam says. He will say whatever he needs to get ahead. It is honestly irritating to me that you and many others here seem to implicitly assume his messages are correlated with truth, doing his social engineering work for him, as if his word should adjust your priors even slightly.

I don't necessarily think he's lying, but there's so much obvious incentive for him to lie here (if only because his employees can save face).