The 2016 Democratic primary campaign—and, to be honest, the 2016 presidential election—was the worst, most depressing political event I’ve ever covered, and I used to spend time hanging around the Massachusetts State House. It wasn’t just the outcome, which admittedly sucked fathoms of pondwater. The whole exercise was a foul amalgam of trivia, bad journalism, rancid celebrity, and dead horses flogged to ribbons. And I can tell you exactly when this occurred to me: it was April 21, 2015, the day on which The New York Times announced that it had decided to go into business with a professional ratfcker named Peter Schweizer and pump up the claims in his meretricious Clinton Cash, which purported to describe the evildoings of Hillary Rodham Clinton and her do-gooder Clinton Foundation.

As Maggie Haberman of the Times tweeted at the time:

@amychozick got her hands on that "Clinton Cash" book, y’all.



As I wrote at the time:



The book has credibility because the New York Times cut a deal with the author. Because of this, the author, and his curious resume, are washed in the blood of the Lamb. (It's God's own little joke that Judy Miller's out there shilling for her longform alibi at the same time that her old employers are touting this unique "arrangement.") I will make the Toby Ziegler bet with Carolyn Ryan that her newspaper linked up with this character because her newspaper has had a hard-on for the Clintons from the time it botched the original Whitewater story right up until last Sunday, when its star political columnist went off her meds again.



Ah, but why go raking around in these dead ashes again? From the Washington Post:



A Justice Department inquiry launched more than two years ago to mollify conservatives clamoring for more investigations of Hillary Clinton has effectively ended with no tangible results, and current and former law enforcement officials said they never expected the effort to produce much of anything...

It all came to nothing. Matthew Horwood Getty Images

As a part of his review, Huber examined documents and conferred with federal law enforcement officials in Little Rock who were handling a meandering probe into the Clinton Foundation, people familiar with the matter said. Current and former officials said that Huber has largely finished and found nothing worth pursuing — though the assignment has not formally ended and no official notice has been sent to the Justice Department or to lawmakers, these people said.



Thumbnail: There was nothing there. There never was anything there. And now we have a handpicked prosecutor from the garden of evil that is this president*’s Department of Justice concluding that there never was anything there. A full election cycle of weaponized bullshit was based on air, on nothing.



But from the start, senior officials inside the Justice Department viewed Huber’s task as unlikely to lead to anything of significance beyond appeasing those angry lawmakers and the president. “We didn’t expect much of it, and neither did he,” said one person familiar with the matter, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of persistent political sensitivities connected to the 2016 election. “And as time went on, a lot of people just forgot about it.”



Well, some people forgot about it, anyway.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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