Nothingburgers all the way down
By 
You will be surprised that an investigation into Hillary Clinton turned out to be a baseless snipe hunt:
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.
John Huber, the U.S. attorney in Utah, was tapped in November 2017 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to look intoconcerns raised by President Trump and his allies in Congress that the FBI had not fully pursued cases of possible corruption at the Clinton Foundation and during Clinton’s time as secretary of state, when the U.S. government decided not to block the sale of a company called Uranium One.
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.
EMAILS! has become the most common shorthand for botched coverage of the 2016 election, and given that it was not only a massively overhyped story but probably changed the outcome of the election, that’s not inappropriate. But I think an argument could be made that the single biggest individual case of malpractice was the Times’s Uranium One Story. First of all, it was a collaboration with a Steve Bannon ratfucking operation, which is something the Times absolutely should not have done, and if it insisted on doing it should have taken extra care to make sure it wasn’t being used to push an anti-Clinton narrative that wasn’t justified by the facts. But instead its investigation found no misconduct by anyone and no material conflict of interest, but wrote a lengthy story that strongly implied they had found both things while burying exonerating information long after most people would have stopped reading.
And, what’s worse, this shadows-were-cast-questions-were-raised stuff kept happening — the Times would keep getting tips from various shady right-wing operatives about the Clinton Foundation, find absolutely nothing, but then write up a story strongly implying misconduct by Clinton rather than admit they had been fooled yet again. Of course, it’s hard to expect the country’s leading newspaper to have the integrity of, uh, Donald Trump and Bill Barr’s Department of Justice.
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.