Donald Trump says the impeachment inquiry is a witch hunt, and I suppose he ought to know. After all, he was the king of the “Lock her up” chant in 2016, and to this day he’s seemingly convinced that Hillary Clinton committed high crimes and misdemeanors with her emails when she was Secretary of State.

And in a way, who can blame him when Clinton’s email problems produced flood-the-zone coverage like this in our nation’s paper of record?

The wheels of justice grind slow but exceeding fine, and three years later the State Department has finally decided that no one really did anything wrong after all:

“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.” The report concluded, “There was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”

I guess I hardly need to tell you where this article ended up, do I?

Lest you think it’s unfair to hold the Times accountable for a conclusion reached three years after their Hillary jihad took place, they could have reached the same conclusion themselves if they’d actually read the entire FBI report, which was released in early September of 2016. I read it, and it flipped my view of Emailgate completely from “sloppy bad judgment but not illegal” to “Hillary did nothing wrong, period.” Of course, the FBI report was 58 pages long, so who can blame anyone for just skimming it? Clinton was obviously sleazy and had been her whole life, so what were the odds that the email affair was just another Republican hit job?

Pretty high, actually, but the Times still hadn’t figured that out in 2016. Bygones, I suppose. Still, you’d think there might at least be an apology in the works or something.