It's a disgrace that the only "major" media outlet to report this was the right-wing Washington Times. After months of having Hillary Clinton's email non-scandal gracing every major media outlet in the country, not one single Beltway reporter caught this one until the Washington Times did. And even after they did, no one reported it until late Friday, when Buzzfeed and Chris Hayes managed to scrounge a report about it.

That's a disgrace.

In a little noticed brief, filed on Wednesday to a federal court, Department of Justice lawyers outlined a comprehensive defense of the contentious decision by Hillary Clinton to wipe the private email server she used as secretary of state: The attorneys assert that, regardless of whether she used a personal or government account, Clinton was within her legal right to handpick the emails that qualified as federal records — and to delete the ones she deemed personal.

“There is no question that former Secretary Clinton had authority to delete personal emails without agency supervision — she appropriately could have done so even if she were working on a government server,” write the Justice Department attorneys, representing the State Department in the brief.

The lawyers add that under policies issued by the State Department and by NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration, government employees “are permitted and expected to exercise judgment to determine what constitutes a federal record.”

Can someone please tell me why there's always extra air time for the likes of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and breathless reports about why Hillary might go to jail, but when the official legal opinion of the United States Department of Justice comes out, there's radio silence?

(It's rhetorical. We all know the answer.)

This coverage has been an utter disgrace right from the beginning, and it's not just doing harm to her candidacy. It's doing harm to our democracy. Imagine what they'll do to Bernie Sanders or any other candidate they view as a serious threat to a Republican presidency.