For the better part of two years I’ve been saying, in principle, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was not wrong to be concerned about the Russians exploiting peripheral Trump campaign figures as witting or unwitting agents. As long as such spying remained discreet and unknown to the public, it could not have influenced the election. Of courses there’s a caveat: if such spying was ordered up on a flimsy premise to legitimize internally a story line about Trump-Russia connections that Obama administration officials would then try to peddle to the public through leaks.

This is what should concern us: that quite apart from illegal leaks, which are themselves a big problem, certain intelligence-agency actions were undertaken deliberately for domestic political purposes. Example: It is absurd at this point to pretend that James Comey’s original intervention in the Hillary Clinton email matter, based on intercepted Russian intelligence, was not such an action. It relieved the Obama Justice Department of the delicate problem of having to defend politically a decision not to prosecute Mrs. Clinton, by pretending that an independent institution (in reality the FBI and its chief worked for Mr. Obama) had made the call.

Mr. Comey would never have waited until three weeks before the Democratic Convention if he were seriously entertaining the possibility that Mrs. Clinton might be charged. The Russian intelligence reportedly consisted of prima facie evidence of Justice Department corruption of the Hillary email case, yet Mr. Comey apparently discounted its import even as he reasoned that this supposedly misleading intelligence somehow required his extraordinary intervention to clear Mrs. Clinton. A subsequent inspector general’s report found Mr. Comey’s intervention improper, but everything about the secret motive behind it remains hidden in a “classified appendix.”

Understand: The alternative was not to charge Mrs. Clinton. It was to let the administration own the decision as it should have.

This is the clearest example of intelligence functions being opportunistically used for domestic political purposes, and to my mind the one from which all else flows. But there are others: