The former FBI Director evades and dodges in an interview with Chris Wallace.

Twenty years ago, Bill Clinton gave us “it depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” James Comey has now given us it depends what the meaning of “vindicated” is.

The former FBI director sat down with Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday over the weekend, and it didn’t go well. Wallace repeatedly pressed Comey on critical findings in the Horowitz IG report, and Comey shimmied and dodged, in a master class in slipperiness and evasion.

To this point, Comey has tended to get away with a lot in media interviews, for several reasons — he has known more about the investigations in question than anyone interviewing him; not much objective, uncontested information about those matters was publicly available; and his interviewers tended to be sympathetic to the point, at times, of sycophancy.

All of these advantages were eroded or nonexistent on Sunday. The Horowitz report has dumped a prodigious amount of material about the investigations out into the public. While Chris Wallace obviously isn’t a law-enforcement professional, he knows the factual record and, as one of the best interviewers on TV, was relentless, yet fair in grilling Comey.

It’s important to give credit to Comey for at least admitting that his previous fulsome statements defending the FISA process were wrong. He’s also on strong ground pushing back against the over-the-top charges against the FBI by the president and his defenders, often put in absurdly inflammatory terms. (Trump just the other day referred to former FBI officials as “scum.”)

But throughout the interview, Comey sought to minimize what had gone wrong in 2016, fighting a rearguard action on behalf of a position no longer worthy of defense.