So now special counsel Robert Mueller has issued his report, and it turns out after two years of investigation, at an estimated cost of $40 million, that "Russiagate" was fake news.
Much to the dismay of Democrats, Mueller found no collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and the Russians to influence the 2016 election.
Who are the winners here?
Of course, the American people -- and, of course, President Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
And, we might say, also House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
At the age of 79, with 32 years in the House of Representatives, Pelosi has a well-honed nose for sniffing out which political road to take.
She told The Washington Post earlier this month: "I'm going to give you some news right now, because I haven't said this to any press person before. ... Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there's something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don't think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he's just not worth it."
Either the speaker's time-tested political sniffer is so fine-tuned that she smelled the fake news driving the Russia conspiracy investigation or she knew that driving the whole thing were dirty tricks that originated in her own party and that Mueller would not and could not cover this up.
This is the big and troubling story left in the wake of the Mueller investigation.
How is it that the FBI, including former Director James Comey, was scammed by the so-called Steele dossier, which was financed through the back door by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee and created the story of the alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians?
How could the supposed elite of our intelligence community be so deceived?
Or maybe, even more troubling, they weren't deceived and were party to the scam.
Enough to give any upstanding American goose bumps.
But unlike their wise old leader, many Democrats are not giving up.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler said weeks ago on ABC's "This Week" that he didn't care what the Mueller report would conclude, noting, "It's very clear that the president obstructed justice."
So why did taxpayers have to shell out tens of millions for this special counsel if Democrats really didn't care what the investigation would conclude?
And how could the president obstruct justice if no crime was committed to begin with?
The answer, of course, is that discovering what is true is something that is of zero interest to Democrats.
They have only one agenda: damaging this president and making it as difficult as possible for him to advance a conservative program.
So despite the conclusions of the Mueller report, there will be document requests and subpoenas pouring forth from Nadler's committee under the claim of suspected obstruction of justice from the White House.
There are many things Democrats do not do well. But the thing they do least well is lose.
For liberals, there is no truth; there is no fair and square. There is only politics.
Hillary Clinton's latest explanation of her loss in 2016 is voter registration shenanigans in Alabama, Georgia and Wisconsin.
Stacey Abrams still refuses to concede that she was defeated in the gubernatorial race in Georgia, persisting that voter suppression engineered by Republicans caused her loss.
We had to suffer recounts in 2018 in Florida in the senatorial and gubernatorial races because losing Democrats refused to concede. This was reminiscent of the "hanging chad' recount in Florida in the 2000 presidential election, when Al Gore refused to concede.
The idea that Russians somehow manipulated the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, with or without collusion from the Trump campaign, is absurd.
The American system works, and we have a president who is fixing this country. These are the truths that Democrats find most difficult to swallow.