Another Republican effort to hype up the thoroughly discredited claims that Hillary Clinton handed over American uranium to Russia is itself being thoroughly discredited. House Republicans claimed to have a confidential informant who would blow this thing wide open. It’s a mystery how that was going to happen when nine different agencies unanimously signed off on the Uranium One deal and Clinton was not the person at the State Department who dealt with the matter. And it’s going to remain a mystery because Democrats have outed this big-deal informant as a total bust.

Republicans had heavily hinted that [William] Campbell would be able to provide testimony linking a speech payment to former President Bill Clinton to the approval of the Uranium One deal by a nine-agency review board known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). The deal was approved unanimously. “You do have the quid, you have the quo. This informant, I believe, would be able to link those two together,” Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) said on Fox News in October. During the interview, Democratic staff say, Campbell was unable to point to anything to support his claims that the review process had been improperly influenced “other than the fact that the [Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS)] allowed the deal to go through.” “When asked whether he had any evidence that Russian influence on the Clintons affected CFIUS’s review of the Uranium One deal, Mr. Campbell stated that ‘that was outside my pay grade’ and that the topic was ‘not my bailiwick,’ ” according to Democrats.

And he didn’t know anything about a speaking fee, either.

Republicans, of course, have refused to release the transcript of their interview with Campbell for some mysterious reason. (Hint: because it would have embarrassed them.) Democrats released their memo summarizing Campbell’s claims to put something on the record.

This is a story the New York Times and Washington Post endlessly hyped back in 2015 after being sold on it by the Steve Bannon-backed book Clinton Cash. Nearly three years later, Republicans are still trying to make this a thing, and it’s still all smoke, mirrors, and BS.