Democrats and their allies in the press spent nearly three years promoting the theory that President Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the 2016 election.

They accused the president of committing treason. Some of the louder and more confident voices in Congress and the press also claimed there is incontrovertible evidence showing the president is a Kremlin asset.

Even after Attorney General William Barr revealed in March that the special counsel report said specifically that its two-year investigation could not “establish that the members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” certain journalists, politicos, Democratic lawmakers, and commentators still clung to the hope that evidence would emerge eventually proving the collusion conspiracy true.

This week, a federal judge in New York rolled his eyes at them all. Judge John Koetl dismissed the Democratic National Committee’s lawsuit alleging that Trump conspired with the Russians, writing simply that the case is “entirely divorced from the facts.”

Koetl ruled further that the First Amendment covers the sharing of leaked DNC emails after they were already made public, contrary to the lawsuit's chief assertion that sharing the stolen emails post-hacking is proof of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. The DNC failed to “raise a factual allegation that suggests that any of the defendants were even aware that the Russian Federation was planning to hack the DNC’s computers until after it had already done so,” the judge wrote, noting the lawsuit itself only ever alleges the Russians hacked the DNC’s emails.

“The DNC argues that the various meetings and conversations between the defendants in this case and with persons connected to the Russian government during the time that [Russian Main Intelligence Directorate] agents were stealing the DNC’s information show that the defendants conspired with the Russian Federation to steal and disseminate the DNC’s materials,” Koetl added. “That argument is entirely divorced from the facts actually alleged in the Second Amended complaint.”

For nearly three years, we were told by Democrats and overeager members of the press that Russian collusion was real and that it would be proven by the special counsel's investigation. Some Democrats went so far as to claim repeatedly that there was “ample evidence” that they had personally “seen” showing Trump conspired with the Russians. Yet, the DNC could not provide a single shred of evidence to back its Kremlin conspiracy theory. Instead, the DNC rested its case on the absurd notion that the act of sharing stolen documents that were already available to the public is proof of collusion.

Lastly, this is worth remembering from Hot Air’s Ed Morrisey: “A civil suit has a lower standard of proof than a criminal prosecution, and the DNC couldn’t even muster enough to keep the judge from dismissing the complaint.”

So, this is how the much-hyped Russia-collusion theory ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.