Special counsel Robert Mueller has found no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, Attorney General William Barr told members of Congress Sunday.

There is also no evidence “to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense," Barr said in a letter detailing the “principal conclusions" of the now-concluded Russia investigation.

So, after thousands of hours of minute-by-minute reporting on Trump and Russian “collusion," the entire Russiagate story just went up in smoke. More than two years of obsessive news coverage and nothing to show for it.

Although this is not technically an exoneration, it is about as close to exoneration for the Trump White House as this report could have possibly produced. At the same time, it’s a major defeat for an already badly battered news media. Think about it: We spent the whole of Trump's first term in office obsessing over a conspiracy theory alleging the president of the United States is a Manchurian Candidate. It has just been debunked.

Cable news, network television, newspapers, and journalists’ Twitter accounts have talked practically non-stop about the Russian collusion issue since even before Trump was inaugurated in 2017. News anchors have hosted every flavor of Democratic crank to speculate wildly about whether the president is owned by the Russians.

“The evidence is pretty clear that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians," Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told MSNBC’s overeager Chris Hayes in 2018.

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., was also given a platform on MSNBC in 2018 to theorize unopposed, “And I am so depending on our special counsel Robert Mueller to connect the dots so that he can prove the collusion."

“Well, look, there’s clear evidence of an attempt to collude," Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said in 2017 during an appearance on CNN.

Then there is the news reporting itself. To put it in the gentlest, politest terms possible, it has been consistently awful.

There is the Russia reporting that has been outright false, including a CNN report that claimed initially that Trump and his inner circle received advance notice during the 2016 presidential election of WikiLeaks' plans to dump thousands of hacked emails belonging to Democratic National Committee staffers and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. A great story, except that the email was sent after the hacked correspondences were made publicly available.

Then there is the absurd Red Scare-style misinformation that pundits and reporters have shared practically non-stop on social media, including the time they mistook White House National Security Council staffer Cari Lutkins for Russian national Maria Butina.

Lastly, there’s the reporting that looks to be 100 percent false in light of the Mueller’s findings, including a fairly recent BuzzFeed report that claimed the Mueller investigation had found Trump “directed his attorney" to “lie to Congress about a potential Trump Tower deal in Moscow during the 2016 election. Mueller himself stated publicly that the story isn't true, after which BuzzFeed's editors went into denial, making claims that his remarks don't mean the entire story is bogus. I'm not sure if they’re still married to that defense now that we know the topline results of the Mueller investigation.

None of this is to say that Mueller shouldn’t have investigated the matter. But newsrooms shouldn’t have gone all-in on "RUSSIAN COLLUSION," airing every crackpot theory and giving serious consideration to every wild prediction imaginable for the last two years. With such little information available about the investigation, unscrupulous reporters elevated all kinds of crazy ideas coming from unreliable corners, and even perhaps made up some of the stories.

Despite everything else going on in the world, we spent the last two years bringing viewers and audiences the blow-by-blow of an investigation that ultimately produced no findings of wrongdoing.

That’s not just anticlimactic. That’s a massive waste of everyone’s time and emotional energy.