Attorney General William Barr is trying to figure out how the Trump-Russia collusion investigation got started. He may find a more complicated story than he suspects. It may well be that ill-willed FBI and CIA agents working against Trump evolved from a much narrower scheme that targeted Michael Flynn long before Donald Trump brought Flynn on to his team, first as a campaign adviser, and then as head of the national security council.

Life does not run in a straight line, and top officials in the intelligence community long had it in for Flynn, ever since he changed the way we did intelligence against al Qaeda in Iraq, and then against the Taliban and Iranian-supported terrorists in Afghanistan. The changes put both intelligence-gathering and anti-terrorist operations primarily under battlefield control, significantly diminishing the power of Washington-based intel officers. These high-ranking officials remained hostile thereafter, as Flynn moved to the headquarters of national intelligence, and then to the Defense Intelligence Agency.