Now that special counsel Robert Mueller has quit the Department of Justice, many Republicans give him a pass for the way he conducted his investigation. This is because his report into the Russia collusion hoax found that neither President Trump nor any other American worked with Moscow to fix the 2016 election. The logic is, “No harm, no foul,” so people avoid shedding their decadeslong admiration for Mueller as a straight arrow.

But there’s an elephant in the room that no cloud of bromide can conceal. It’s that Mueller conducted his investigation and wrote his report with an animus against the president and a reflex to defend his own colleagues in the intelligence community. Byron York provides a lucid retrospective on the whole Russia conspiracy theory, which has plagued our politics and hobbled the federal government for more than two years.