In the TOC Ready Room preview for this article, I alluded to the principal point of highlighting the information in it. That point is that Spygate was not a pick-up-game reaction to events in 2016. In terms of involvement by the Obama federal agencies and Hillary Clinton’s network, evidence of connections to prior motives and preparation abounds.

Examples include Alexandra Chalupa and a cast of Obama officials already seeking Ukrainian cooperation on a Manafort-focused narrative in January 2016, before Manafort joined the Trump campaign and before the first primary election had been held. If this was about impugning Manafort, why? By 2019 we could see that getting ahead of any bad news about Biden was an obvious motive – but was it a priority at that point, considering Biden wasn’t running in 2016? Did Republicans in general know enough about the Biden shenanigans to create a pervasive problem for…