Hillary Clinton's Emails Were Always a Nothingburger. The State Department Just Finally Caught Up.

Photo credit: Getty Images
Photo credit: Getty Images

From Esquire

Found: deep in the A-section of Friday's New York Times.

Did you miss this story? I did.

The nine-page unclassified report, completed last month and shared with Congress this week, appears to bookend a controversy that dogged Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign against Donald J. Trump. Mrs. Clinton blamed the F.B.I.’s handling of the inquiry for crippling her campaign after James B. Comey, then the bureau’s director, reopened his investigation into the server days before the general election after initially declining to bring charges. “While there were some instances of classified information being inappropriately introduced into an unclassified system in furtherance of expedience,” the report said, “by and large, the individuals interviewed were aware of security policies and did their best to implement them in their operations.”

"Bookend a controversy" that "dogged" HRC's campaign? How about "central to an ongoing act of journalistic malpractice that helped install a vulgar talking yam into the presidency*"?

I will never forget the day that James Comey came bumbling his way back to center stage in October, right before the election. I attended two Trump rallies that day—the first in Manchester, N.H. and the second in a small town in Maine. The Comey letter dropped into the news while I was driving from Manchester to Maine. The difference between the rallies was astonishing. In Manchester, prior to Comey's re-emergence as The Accidental Ratfcker, the crowd was muted, almost nostalgic. They'd all had their fun but now it looked as though the ride was over. By the time I got to Maine, the crowd in the gym of a local Christian high school was absolutely steaming. Somewhere on the darkening New England landscape, a once-immutable timeline seemed to have shifted. And here we are.

It was always a nothingburger, just as the Whitewater part of Whitewater had been 20 years earlier. I watched in fascination as person after person after person fell under the spell of yet another Clinton scandal for which we were all just one interview, one document, one congressional hearing away from finding out What Really Happened. Of course, we never quite caught up to those things because, well, Nothing Ever Really Happened. I can't help but recall that day when Ken Starr appeared before the House Judiciary Committee and had to admit there was never anything to Whitewater, Filegate, TravelGate and assorted other Gates.

Now, this. I think I blew out a rotator cuff throwing up my hands.

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