We’ve spent plenty of time explaining how PolitiFact is not the “arbiter of truth” they present themselves to be. In fact, as John Nolte has so brilliantly pointed out over the years, most of these “fact checker” sites are merely opportunities for the media to protect liberal politicians and agendas by attacking any opposition under the cloaking device of “fact checking.”

So, imagine how hard it must have been for the team of lefties over at PolitiFact to reluctantly concede that for the past 15 months, their candidate of choice, Hillary Clinton, has been lying to our faces about her unauthorized, non-secure, private email scam.

Regarding her decision to use a private email server, Clinton said, “It was allowed.” No one ever stopped Clinton from conducting work over her private email server exclusively. But that’s not the same thing as it being allowed. Offices within the State Department told an independent inspector general that if she had asked, they would not have allowed it. The report from the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General shatters one of Clinton’s go-to phrases about her email practice. We rate her claim False.

So is it time to throw a little praise PolitiFact’s way? Hardly.

Why is PolitiFact “fact-checking” Clinton’s “It was allowed” statement from 5 days ago? It makes it sound like she just made this remark and PolitiFact is “Johnny on the spot” with the truth.

Oh please.

Hillary has been lying about the imaginary “permission” for her email scam since day one of the scandal. Literally.

“First, the laws and regulations in effect when I was secretary of state allowed me to use my email for work. That is undisputed.”

And she has repeated some form of the “it was permitted” or “it was allowed” lie at every opportunity.

Yet PolitiFact makes it sound like they are pouncing on this new statement from last week only because the State Department’s Inspector General’s report backs up what we in the new media have been saying for months.

First of all, the State Department’s policy as of 2005 (Clinton joined in 2009) is that all day-to-day operations are to be conducted on the official State Department information channel. Clinton never once used this State Department email system. And if an employee needs to use a personal email for conducting official business, he or she has an “obligation” to consult with the chief information officer and the assistant secretary for diplomatic security. However, Clinton did neither. These two offices told the inspector general that they “did not — and would not — approve her exclusive reliance on a personal email account to conduct Department business, because of the restrictions in the (Foreign Affairs Manual) and the security risks in doing so.”

In their explanation printed above, PolitiFact reveals that they didn’t need to wait nearly a year and a half to call out Clinton on her lie. “State Department’s policy as of 2005 (Clinton joined in 2009) is that all day-to-day operations are to be conducted on the official State Department information channel.” Period. Full stop.

We’ve all known that policy and we’ve all known that Clinton willfully broke that policy. So why wait to call the once and future president a liar? Because the IG report gives PolitiFact the fig leaf they need. It would have taken actual journalism and courage to use the power of their brand to call Hillary out on the obvious lie that her use of a private, unsecured server was “permitted” prior to the IG report, and PolitiFact just couldn’t ring themselves to do so.

It’s not like it would have been difficult to ask the Clinton campaign some follow-up questions to expose her lie. But for months, nobody did.

Any parent dealing with a child who is obviously trying to cover-up a misdeed knows how to cut through the smoke screen of a statement like “it was permitted.” What’s the obvious follow-up? “Well then, WHO permitted it?”

It took months of this obfuscation before none other than Fusion’s Jorge Ramos finally asked the question at a debate earlier this year:

RAMOS: So who specifically gave you permission to operate your email system as you did? Was it President Barack Obama? And would you drop out of the race if you get indicted? CLINTON: Well, Jorge, there’s a lot of questions in there. And I’m going to give the same answer I’ve been giving for many months. It wasn’t the best choice. I made a mistake. It was not prohibited. It was not in any way disallowed. And as I have said and as now has come out, my predecessors did the same thing and many other people in the government. But here’s the cut to the chase facts. I did not send or receive any emails marked classified at the time. What you are talking about is retroactive classification. And the reason that happens is when somebody asks or when you are asked to make information public, I asked all my emails to be made public. Then all the rest of the government gets to weigh in. And some other parts of the government, we’re not exactly sure who, has concluded that some of the emails should be now retroactively classified. They’ve just said the same thing to former Secretary Colin Powell. They have said, we’re going to retroactively classify emails you sent personally. CLINTON: Now I think he was right when he said this is an absurdity. And I think that what we have got here is a case of overclassification. RAMOS: If we get your permission… CLINTON: I am not concerned about it. I am not worried about it and no Democrat or American should be either. (APPLAUSE) RAMOS: Secretary Clinton, the questions were, who gave you permission to cooperate? Was it President Obama? CLINTON: There was no permission to be asked. It had been done by my predecessors. It was permitted.

“There was no permission to be asked. It was done by my predecessors. It was permitted,” she said. And that’s just a lie. None of her predecessors had private, unsecured email servers. None of her predecessors conducted all of their State Department business via private email versus a State.gov email address.

That was a lie.

It was a lie in March 2016 at the Fusion debate when she said it.

It was a lie in March 2015 when she said it at the press conference at the UN when the story first broke.

It was a lie last week when she said it to ABC News.

But only now does PolitiFact decide to sneak a “fact-check” out to attempt to maintain a tad bit of credibility.

Don’t fall for it.