Durham’s detractors crow that he couldn’t indict a ham sandwich, and disingenuously use this point to drive the narrative there was no “there” there in arguably the greatest scandal in American history. His champions may feel the same, only lamenting rather than cheering that Team Durham couldn’t indict that ham sandwich—considering the bit players he prosecuted—and that, moreover, the special counsel failed to pursue the biggest fish who so gravely betrayed our republican system from within the government itself.

A sober analysis of the special counsel’s performance—pending any final report—justifies Durham’s supporters’ despondency. But such supporters ought to be despondent not solely due to Durham’s doings, but due to the state of our ruling regime itself—the rot of which the special counsel, in both his failures and successes, intentionally and unintentionally exposed.

To review, the special counsel brought three cases against relative Russiagate small fries.

The first was Kevin Clinesmith, a FBI attorney accused of doctoring an email wrongly used to spy on the Trump campaign, foisting a fraud on the FISA court. He pled guilty to one count of making a false statement, and never went to jail. In fact, the Washington, D.C. bar restored his membership to “good standing” while he was still on probation.

The second was Michael Sussmann, a Clinton campaign lawyer and former DOJ official accused of lying on several occasions about who he was representing when, while working on said campaign, he brought campaign-generated Trump-Russia dirt to the FBI—lies that Durham argued deceived the FBI and poisoned the Trump probes. A not-particularly-representative “jury of his peers” let Sussmann off the hook, acquitting him on all charges before a seemingly favorable judge despite ample evidence of guilt.

The third was Igor Danchenko, recently acquitted on all charges he had provided false statements to the FBI about various aspects of the dirty Steele dossier—a document the FBI’s top intelligence analyst on Trump-Russia collusion could never corroborate any aspects of, yet nonetheless relied on to keep pursuing the former president.

So Durham’s cases on their face barely touched on the government—rather, focusing on the Clinton campaign, and an asset of the Clinton campaign who, we discovered during his trial, became an asset of the FBI.

Yet as covered in this column previously, Durham used his cases to reveal not only the information operation the Clinton campaign ran to present Trump as a Russian traitor, and how the campaign flooded the federal government from a million directions with its fake evidence, but also how the feds at every turn engaged in willful blindness to lawlessly, recklessly, and corruptly pursue Trump-Russia collusion despite knowing full well it was consuming poisonous fruit from poisonous trees forming the ultimate poisonous forest.

The Danchenko case was no different.

It revealed, among other things, that the FBI:

Made Danchenko an informant after it knew he was lying, paying him over $200,000 during the Trump presidency, shutting him up, shielding the shoddy source from scrutiny, and therefore shielding itself from scrutiny;Offered Danchenko’s boss Christopher Steele up to a million dollars to prove allegations of the dossier in an October 2016 meeting, which he refused;Covered its eyes and ears to aspects of Danchenko’s past that would’ve made him unfit for selection as an informant—including that he had previously faced a counterintelligence probe; andThat its agents operating under the Mueller special counsel investigation limited the scope of their inquiry into the Steele dossier, ensuring that damning information about the original investigation into the dossier would remain hidden.

Over the span of these cases, the question became not whether the federal government was a mere party to Russiagate, but the extent to which it was an active co-conspirator—if not the primary culprit itself.

Durham’s shifting rhetoric reflected this transition.

Originally, Durham’s special counsel team presented the federal government as a hapless dupe. At the outset of the Sussmann case, a Durham prosecutor said in court that, “We are here because the FBI is our institution. It should not be used as a political tool [n.b.: duped] for anyone—not Republicans. Not Democrats. Not anyone.”

By the close of the Danchenko trial, Durham himself was saying, “the FBI failed here,” that it “mishandled the investigation,” and that agents “didn’t do what they should have done.”

He speculated that the FBI could have been “simply incompetent,” or alternatively that it had been “working in coordination”—presumably, with the Clinton campaign.

With all the resources at their disposal, Durham and his team should know the truth by now. We the People deserve to know the truth, too.

Perhaps Durham’s final report will reveal it. Any report should detail the scope of the special counsel’s investigation, the leads it followed, what those leads revealed, and why, if it failed to bring charges against the myriad Deep State officials we already know have been implicated in wrongdoing from just the three cases Durham brought—the probe declined to try and bring those apparatchiks to justice.

Of course, given that two of the cases Durham brought—which seemed to the layman to be slam dunks—resulted in acquittals, this fact alone might explain why so many went uncharged.

This points, in the final analysis, to two theories about the Durham special counsel probe.

The first theory is that the fix was in all along. Durham was, and is, essentially a captured element of the Deep State, who would never hold it to account—how can Department of Justice officials be trusted to take on their own institution over such a widespread scandal running to its top ranks? Under this theory, Durham would have been installed just for “optics,” given that the evidence revealed about the Russiagate scandal even pre-Durham was already so overwhelming.

The second theory is that Durham did the best he could given the severe constraints. This was a scandal that might be understood to be “too big to prosecute,” what with how many “made men” of the regime were implicated, in such massive malfeasance, in pursuit of a cause deemed as righteous as that of taking down Trump—and relatedly, that even with slam dunk cases, one apparently cannot win on the regime’s home D.C.-area turf. Therefore, Durham could do no more than bring cases only indirectly aimed at their named, outside targets, in order to illuminate the sordid inside game, and perhaps pen a final report spelling it out more clearly.

Regardless of the “why,” the special counsel probe has proven sadly revealing, in both the depth and breadth of the corruption and lawlessness it exposed, as well as its inability or unwillingness to go further and bring to heel the most powerful perpetrators of the gravest governmental abuses.

We must never forget that the regime’s security apparatus worked to destroy a sitting president. It now seems hell-bent on destroying his supporters. To understand why such efforts persist, look no further than the seemingly sorry end to the Durham special counsel probe.

Ben Weingarten is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, fellow at the Claremont Institute and senior contributor to The Federalist. He is the author of American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party (Bombardier, 2020). Ben is the founder and CEO of ChangeUp Media LLC, a media consulting and production company. Subscribe to his newsletter at bit.ly/bhwnews, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.