Toward the end of the 2016 election season, a scandal erupt-… well, it didn’t erupt. It sputtered a bit, but that’s largely because it concerned Hillary Clinton’s email scandal.

Bill Clinton was spotted meeting with Barack Obama’s Attorney General, Loretta Lynch. This was during the height of the email investigation and it was shady as all hell. As one would expect, Republicans and conservatives demanded this receive the attention it deserved – at the very least, enough media scrutiny to cause Lynch to come out and say whether or not she would recuse herself.

Of course, that didn’t happen and the media reported on it briefly and moved on. They, to borrow Obama’s phrase, felt there was no there there.

The coverage the event did garner, however, seems to have been under protest. How do we know this? The American Center for Law and Justice released emails between reporters and the Department of Justice, and the reporters were clearly not enthused about being assigned the story.

The non-profit American Center for Law and Justice published emails Friday that showed reporters asking Department of Justice officials for details on the meeting. Mark Landler, a reporter for the Times, is seen in one June 30 email reaching out to a DOJ official to say he’s “been pressed into service to write about the questions being raised” by the meeting. Matt Zapotosky with the Post emailed a DOJ official the same day after several other emails to say that his editors “are still pretty interested” in the story but that he wanted to “put it to rest.” Lynch and Clinton had met on the tarmac in Phoenix to discuss “primarily social” matters, according to public comments Lynch made after the meeting.

The full emails can be seen at the ACLJ’s site here.

It’s a fascinating inside look at the mind of a liberal journalist. They cannot hide their contempt for writing a story they don’t like. Whether or not the story is something they want to cover, it is their job to do so and to do it to the best of their ability, not half-ass it in order to get it out of the way. These are the same kinds of journalists who will preach at you about being so important that they will fight the current White House for access because the American people have to know.

It’s absurd. And it’s hypocritical.