BY THE TIME I NOTICED IT, THIS HITJOB ON PAUL RYAN HAD ALREADY COLLAPSED: Hey Paul Ryan haters, your congressional insider trader suspect actually is Sheldon Whitehouse.

Paul Ryan falsely was accused today by left-wing bloggers, most notably Matthew Yglesias (formerly of Think Progress now of Slate), of insider trading based on confidential information provided by the Treasury Secretary to Congress on September 18, 2008.

That day, Ryan traded Citigroup stock.

The accusation fell apart when someone noticed that the congressional meeting was in the evening of September 18, after the markets closed and Ryan already had completed his trades. Yglesias issued a retraction, and even New York Magazine defended Ryan on the charge of insider trading (which at the time would have been legal for members of Congress).

If Yglesias and the rest of the left-blogosphere want to chase someone for insider trading based solely on the timing of trades around the September 18 congressional briefing, then they need look no further than their hero Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), as I detailed on November 19, 2011, Sheldon Whitehouse, luckiest investor in America? . . .

I don’t know that Sheldon Whitehouse traded on inside congressional information, but the timing is a lot more suspicious than that of Paul Ryan.

It’s time for Whitehouse to release all the records and make the money manager available for questioning.

It’s also time for the Ryan-haters to realize they wished too hard for something, and now they have it.

Read the whole thing.

Related: All Right, Everybody Quit Making Fun Of Matthew Yglesias.