I know we're all excited about the DNS surveillance story. The media is frantically spinning it and conservatives are playing it up with pictures of a scowling Durham. Building cults of personality around prosecutors rarely ends well. And when all is said and done, Durham may disappoint conservatives as much as Mueller disappointed leftists. Just remember that Durham was left alone by Biden's people. That means they don't expect him to nail anyone too big. Whether or not there's a tacit agreement in place, no one is feeling all that threatened by Durham otherwise there would have been a significant campaign to take him down.
There's hardly been a whiff of that.
Ultimately, Durham may echo Mueller in that an extended investigation will nail a few mid-tier characters with charges that will ultimately lead to fairly little in the way of consequences.
But that's also how D.C. operates.
Durham is laboriously building a case, but his case is largely directed at the middlemen in the interface who made Russiagate work, rather than at the upper level people who gave the orders. That means that some lawyers and some government officials will get in trouble and pay the price. But no one likely to do serious damage to the Clintons, let alone the Clintons, and likely few of those who genuinely were calling the shots. Patsies, expendables, yes.
That's D.C.
Why? For one thing you can bet that the Clintons insulated themselves pretty carefully. And so did their more significant underlings. But it's also not what Durham is after. His investigation doesn't have the attitude of a giantslayer. His work is characterized by an effort to clean house and punish those middlemen who abused the system, rather than aspiring to go after their bosses. The message here is that partisan politics should not be allowed to taint government work and that the government, especially anything smacking of national security and law enforcement, should not be abused to take down political opponents.
It's a good message, but its scope will be constrained to cleansing the process, rather than doing anything more ambitious. But that's also D.C.
