Really, NBC News? It’s not like this is about Jeffrey Wigand violating a corporate confidentiality agreement with a major tobacco company. It’s Donald Trump. He files lawsuits as much as he eats Tic Tacs.

Way to go Comcast. You dithered and as a result, you got scooped:

NBC News was aware of video footage of Donald Trump making lewd and disparaging remarks about women for nearly four days, a network executive said Saturday, but held onto the recording until lawyers finished reviewing the material.

The network’s caution led to an awkward result: NBC News was scooped by The Washington Post, which took just five hours to vet and post its story. A tip from a source led to the Post breaking one of the most consequential stories of the 2016 presidential campaign.

Naturally we find out that NBC News went digging into Trump’s past. Now.

NBC News first became aware of the footage late Monday after receiving notice from producers at “Access Hollywood,” a syndicated entertainment-news program owned by NBC. The program’s producers had combed their archives for interviews with Trump after reading an Associated Press account of crude remarks he had made about female contestants on “The Apprentice,” the NBC reality program that Trump had starred on for 14 seasons.

This raises the obvious question: Why wasn’t NBC looking through these archives last year? The idea that Trump has made crude remarks about women is not a revelation that came to light in the last few months. This has been known for years.

All of sudden, somebody got the journalism itch over at NBC News and finally decided to dig around? Is it any wonder conservatives don’t trust the media?

Regardless, NBC News should be ashamed of themselves, waiting for an “OK” from the lawyers before proceeding with a news story.