Back in the hazy days of August 2006, when Joe Lieberman was fighting for his political life against billionaire insurgent Ned Lamont in the Connecticut senatorial primary, Lieberman’s web site crashed. It came at a bad time — the day before the Aug. 8, 2006 primary — and Lieberman’s team was quick to blame the Lamont camp, with Lieberman spokeswoman Marion Steinfels accusing it of a “coordinated effort to wreck our Web site and make us incapable of communicating with each other and our voters.” The Lamont team vehemently denied responsibility and even offered to help get Joementum’s site up and running again.

(Here’s a fun video showing a newscast from the time and the Lamont campaign’s reaction. If you squint you might spot Obama Internet Director Joe Rospars, former Lamont and Chris Dodd staffer Tim Tagaris, and Firedoglake’s Jane Hamsher, among others.)

A few months later the U.S. attorney’s office cleared Lamont of any wrongdoing.

Now, the Stamford Advocate reports that the FBI had come to the same conclusion back in October 2006. “The server that hosted the joe2006.com Web site failed because it was overutilized and misconfigured. There was no evidence of (an) attack,” the FBI office in New Haven wrote at the time (the information has just come to light as a result of Freedom of Information Act request filed in — get this — late 2006).

Back in August 2006, the progressive blogging community — which had been heavily backing the anti-war Lamont — immediately came to the Lamont campaign’s defense, worked with them to disprove Lieberman’s claims.

“The best part about that day was how distributed research debunked the entire claim, blindly and nearly flawlessly as it unfolded throughout the day,” Tagaris says.

In a statement, a Lieberman spokesperson said,

After the Lieberman campaign website went down the day before the 2006 Democratic primary, we were told by our website administrator that there was clear evidence of an outside effort to disrupt our site, and that the administrator was so certain that the site had been attacked that he was willing to swear to it in a legal affidavit. Based on his assessment, and the fact that there had been at least one prior attack on the campaign’s website, the campaign asked the Justice Department to investigate the incident to find out what happened and determine if a crime had been committed. The Justice Department has shared the results of their investigation with us, the Senator appreciates their diligence and accepts their findings, and we consider the matter closed.

Today local radio journalist Colin McEnroe, whose radio show was one of the main battlegrounds during the scuffle, recalled the incident. “There was a kind of fusion of e-mail, talk show and cell phone as each side tried to convince me — sometimes in heated conversations during commercial breaks — that the other side was wrong and possibly evil… To their credit, the Lamont people figured out the truth pretty quickly — that they hadn’t done it and that inherent problems with Lieberman’s skimpy web set up had caused the problem.”