As the Russia hoax unfolded, Trump-supporters knew that Trump and his team would be vindicated.  Vindication began in 2019, when Mueller was unable to tie Trump or his campaign to Russia.  Today, the trickle of stories about the Obama administration's illegal spying on and lying about Trump is becoming a flood.

But with all of these stories coming down the pike, one question stands out above all the others: why wasn't General Flynn just one target among many people who were spied upon in case they could derail either Trump's campaign or his presidency?  The administration's excessive unmasking requests, the fact that the Kislyak phone call wasn't masked to begin with, and the vicious prosecution show that Flynn was special.

The redoubtable Lee Smith thinks the answer lies in Obama's obsession with making the Iran deal his ultimate legacy:

The answer is that Obama saw Flynn as a signal threat to his legacy, which was rooted in his July 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Flynn had said long before he signed on with the Trump campaign that it was a catastrophe to realign American interests with those of a terror state. And now that the candidate he'd advised was the new president-elect, Flynn was in a position to help undo the deal. To stop Flynn, the outgoing White House ran the same offense it used to sell the Iran deal — they smeared Flynn through the press as an agent of a foreign power, spied on him, and leaked classified intercepts of his conversations to reliable echo chamber allies.

Most of us could tell that Russia was a straw man.  Obama's actual attitude to Russia was summed up in two moments.  In March 2012, Obama asked then-president Medvedev to tell the real power, Putin, that he would be more flexible about missile defense after his re-election.  He practically begged for Russia to interfere in the 2012 election:

Then, in July 2012, during a debate with Romney, Obama spoke a rehearsed line about Russia's irrelevance:

Obama wasn't the only one who had a problem, not with Russia, but with Flynn, writes Smith.  The FBI also feared Flynn because he knew where the secrets were:

Obama and his foreign policy team were hardly the only people in Washington who had their knives out for Michael Flynn. Nearly everyone did, especially the FBI. As former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon's spy service, and a career intelligence officer, Flynn knew how and where to find the documentary evidence of the FBI's illegal spying operation buried in the agency's classified files — and the FBI had reason to be terrified of the new president's anger.

Flynn had also proven prophetic about Middle East terrorism (e.g., challenging Obama's dismissive claim that ISIS was a "J.V. team"):

"Flynn's warnings that extremists were regrouping and on the rise were inconvenient to an administration that didn't want to hear any bad news," says former DIA analyst Oubai Shahbandar. "Flynn's prophetic warnings would play out exactly as he'd warned shortly after he was fired."

An intelligence master, Flynn understood the weaknesses in America's intelligence-gathering, especially regarding jihadist Islam.  The Obama administration, however, did not want better information about Iran.  Obama wanted a deal, no matter what.  When Flynn had lined up a CENTCOM meeting in Virginia to advance investigating an al Qaeda–Iran nexus, the Obama administration shut it down:

The administration was, it appears, clearing space for Obama to implement his big foreign policy idea — the Iran nuclear deal. Another aide, Ben Rhodes, had said in 2013 that the Iran Deal was the White House's key second-term initiative. Evidence that Tehran was coordinating with a terror group that had slaughtered thousands in Manhattan and at the Pentagon would make it harder to convince American lawmakers of the wisdom in legitimizing Iran's nuclear weapons program.

What was the information about al-Qaida's ties to Iran that Flynn wanted his CENTCOM team to get out? According to published news reports, the bin Laden database included "letters about Iran's role, influence, and acknowledgment of enabling al-Qaida operatives to pass through Iran as long as al-Qaida did its dirty work against the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan." One of those letters showed that "Al-Qaeda was working on chemical and biological weapons in Iran."

Smith's done his homework and has a lot more to say about Obama's relentless, anti-Semitic, illegal, and anti-American drive to seal the deal.  This shoddy, dangerous deal was going to be his legacy, and nobody — especially Flynn — was going to stop him.

What perplexes me is the fact that Flynn said nothing about any of this while he was being persecuted, er, prosecuted.  As an extremely successful spy chief, he was the one who ought to have scared the Democrats running this corrupt show.  Think how Chuck Schumer described the risks of running afoul of the Intelligence Community:

Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you. So, even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he's being really dumb to do this.

If I'm correct about my facts, there's a disconnect here that lends itself to two explanations.  The first is that the DOJ and FBI didn't stop at threatening to destroy Flynn's son.  There may have been some stronger threat there that truly silenced Flynn, and that's now been neutralized.  The second is that Trump early on promised Flynn that he would make him whole in some way but asked that Flynn let the process play out for some greater political goal, such as bringing down the whole corrupt Obama-Deep State edifice.