Was the Democrats’ years-long investigation into Donald Trump for colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 presidential election a legitimate endeavor, or was it an illegal and utterly illegitimate deep state conspiracy to frame and thus incapacitate a duly elected president?

The answer might seem as obvious to you as it does to us, and it might seem like old news, but the question is going to be addressed anew when Special Counsel John Durham releases his report.

We don’t know when, exactly, that report will be released, but we can be certain that the Democrats are worried about it — which is why they’re already working the refs, already scheming about how best to smear Durham and tar his investigation and preemptively poison the well ahead of the release of his report.

The Democrats, in fact, might go even further: They might be trying to discredit Durham to such an extent that it gives Attorney General Merrick Garland reason to block the release of the report altogether.

All this started on Thursday, when a troika of New York Times activists “journalists” published a hit piece under the following headline: “How Barr’s Quest to Find Flaws in the Russia Inquiry Unraveled.”

The story’s subhead was even more agenda-driven: “The review by John Durham at one point veered into a criminal investigation related to Donald Trump himself, even as it failed to find wrongdoing in the origins of the Russia inquiry.”

Let’s be clear: Just because Durham was unable to convince a rigged jury in a rigged town and secure a host of criminal convictions doesn’t mean he “failed to find wrongdoing.” Durham has found plenty of wrongdoing, and his report will spell it out — and that’s what the Democrats are afraid of.

They’re so afraid, in fact, that ultra-partisan Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, is planning to look into claims that Durham “misled witnesses about the nature of his probe, ignored allegations that former President Donald Trump may have committed financial crimes, and rushed a case to trial even though his staffers quit because they thought it was unwinnable.”

His rationale for this investigation of the investigators of the investigators? The aforementioned New York Times story. That’s it. One would think that Durbin would be a bit more cautious before falling for a story by the same folks that for years carried Uncle Joe Stalin’s water, and insisted that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of WMD, and that told us Russia had bounties on our troops’ heads in Afghanistan, and told us that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick was beaten to death with a fire extinguisher by Trump supporters.

But no.

In a statement released yesterday — one that refers to the New York Times’s “bombshell” report and appears suspiciously well-orchestrated — Durbin said the following:

These reports about abuses in Special Counsel Durham’s investigation — so outrageous that even his longtime colleagues quit in protest — are but one of many instances where former President Trump and his allies weaponized the Justice Department.

The Justice Department should work on behalf of the American people, not for the personal benefit of any president. As we wait for the results of ongoing internal reviews, the Senate Judiciary Committee will do its part and take a hard look at these repeated episodes, and the regulations and policies that enabled them, to ensure such abuses of power cannot happen again.

Notice that “cannot happen again” language there at the end. Does it sound like anything you’ve heard before? Anything Donald Trump might’ve said a dozen times in the wake of the whole phony Crossfire Hurricane investigation?

Any way we slice it, the Democrats seem to be behaving strangely. They seem to be nervous, panicky, almost as if they know that the contents of Durham’s report are damning.

Why else would they be paying such attention to an investigation that failed to secure even one meaningful conviction — unless one counts the wrist-slap meted out to bit-player Kevin Clinesmith for making a false statement? Indeed, it’s already been two years since an Obama-appointed judge, James Boasberg, sentenced Clinesmith to a pathetic 12 months’ probation and 400 hours of community service for having altered an email to indicate that Trump associate Carter Page was “not a source” for the CIA when in fact he was. The alteration was significant in that it paved the way for the FBI to obtain its FISA warrant to initiate surveillance on Page, which paved the way for The Corrupt FBI™ to spy on Trump himself.

Most notably and frustratingly, Durham’s investigation of the investigators failed to hold anyone else accountable for Clinesmith’s crime, and so the American people — or at least the 1% of them who have any clue as to who Clinesmith is — are left to believe that he acted alone. Which doesn’t pass the giggle test.

In any event, let’s be fully aware of what the Democrats and their Leftmedia lickspittles are doing here: They’re prebunking a report that’s bound to reveal just how dirty they are.