In all the most important ways, Donald Trump’s Thursday night rally was simply another installment in his sad, sick show of hatred, bullying racism, and irrationality. Like all stale serials limping into a fourth season, Trump’s traveling sideshow relied on recycling every standard line and mindless catchphrase. That included claims about a wall that have been proven a lie a hundred times over, and it included Trump nodding along to “Lock her up” chants and following up with claims that his 2016 opponent really deserved to be behind bars.
But even as Trump was rambling on about Hillary Clinton, word leaked that a two-year fishing expedition into everything Clinton was ending … without so much as a minnow.
Just as Attorney General William Barr has given handpicked U.S. Attorney John Durham an open-ended mandate to find some way to prove Trump’s deep-state conspiracy delusions around the Russia investigation, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions handed U.S. Attorney John Huber carte blanche to find some justification for turning Trump’s rally chant into reality. As The Washington Post reports, given more than two years to look into everything from the Uranium One deal to the details of the Clinton Foundation, Huber has come back with “no tangible results.”
Which isn’t really much of a surprise. No matter how Republicans painted it, and how many times Trump and others tried to make it seem that Clinton had in some way profited, the connection to the Uranium One deal was always no more than tangential. The State Department was just one of several agencies that had to initial its agreement with a deal that came with the pre-approval of the Canadian government, a deal that never involved handing over a single ounce of U.S. uranium to Russia. Multiple past attempts to find some way to claim wrongdoing by Clinton on this subject have already come up dry, and it seems that Huber also failed to find any substance behind baseless claims that were never more than … baseless claims.
Similarly, the 2016 election cycle included endless accusations centered on the Clinton Foundation. Those came not just from Trump and Republicans, but also from reporters so anxious to find a story that they were willing to create one—such as the team at the Associated Press, which carefully carved and shaped a story to make it appear that Clinton used her role as secretary of state to favor foundation contributors, a story that remains unsupported by any real-world data three years later. On this topic as well, it seems that Huber found nothing.
What every past examination found was that the Clinton Foundation was on the up-and-up, unlike the fake charity Trump used to buy paintings and pay off golf bets. In fact, the Clinton Foundation was rated as both one of the most transparent and most effective charities on the planet, and the work it did and continues to do, particularly in the treatment of AIDS sufferers in Africa, is invaluable. Despite also taking charge of existing investigations started by others who had already been looking into this area and hoping to catch either Hillary or Bill Clinton at something that would validate decades of conspiracy theories and wild claims, it seems that Huber also surfaced with nothing but conclusions that the charity is in fact a charity.
Huber’s all-purpose investigation also included yet another look into But Her Emails, both dipping into the circumstances of Clinton’s use of a personal email server and taking what seems to have been at least the fourth swing at examining how the FBI conducted its initial investigation. On this front as well, it seems he found nothing new.
The fact that Huber’s investigation discovered no actual wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton is likely to be a momentary frustration for Trump, and for House Republicans whose current minority position means that, while they can continue to announce endless investigations, no one really cares. And it may cause a passing frown for Trump, who won’t be able to actually drag his erstwhile opponent before his ravening mob in chains. But they’ll get over it. And keep right on chanting.