The scientists were cleared? When and by whom?
No civil organisation in the UK would be legally competent to acribe motive and 'deliberateness' to the CRU fraudsters anyway, so this verbal finesse tells us all we need to know.
They weren't cleared of malpractice: how could they be? They lost/destroyed their raw data, they refuse to explain their extraordinary manipulations of temperature station data and their equally extraordinary cherry-picking of tree-ring data.
Their malpractice is there for all the world to see - but we can't be 100% sure they did it deliberately. Because we're not telepaths.