Comment by morpheuskafka

It’s doubtful you’ll get any answers. Lawyers are of little help due to “consular nonreviewability” and your case clearly has hit some sort of national security flag. Since this was pre Trump II, it likely was a real human review not their new approach of automated revocations for poorly designed queries (a student was recently revoked due to fishing license citations).

As I understand, AP generally means Washington and not the consulate is actually the block/decision maker now, but they wouldn’t even officially tell you that. It could be with State or they could be waiting an opinion from someone. Picture some CIA agent who got stuck with a boring desk job and has a stack of thousands of visas to research.