TOM SHATTUCK: For Obama, spying is nothing new.

In what has already been a historically bad year for Democrats, it just may be that they’re about to lose again to Donald Trump, this time in a high-stakes game of Russian roulette.

The Dems’ Putin smear was supposed to paint President Trump as a friend of the tyrant and beneficiary of Russian meddling in the election. Instead, it is the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party, former President Barack Obama, who may take the fall.

Snooping on a presidential candidate is serious business.

The Democrats want you to think this is a crazy conspiracy theory for an unhinged tweeting president.

But Obama has a rich legacy of using the federal government as a political weapon and it would be foolish to think he suddenly started restraining himself, when he was never held to account by either the media or Democrats in power.

Remember, Obama’s Justice Department secretly subpoenaed the private phone records of Associated Press editors and reporters. It was pure spying.

Yeah, it’s not like the charges are out of character for Obama.

UPDATE: Stephen Hayes:

Even if Trump’s tweets were irresponsible—based only on media reports— Democrats and many journalists have treated the substance of the claims themselves as utterly inconceivable. Is it?

It’s the Obama Rorschach test. When Valerie Jarrett claimed shortly before the end of the Obama presidency that he’d had a “scandal free” eight years, most Democrats and journalists nodded their heads and most conservatives howled with a combination of laughter and frustration. To the extent that they paid attention to them at all, for journalists, the Obama scandals were minor footnotes to a much happier story of the Obama presidency. But for conservatives they were not just part of the story but key drivers of the narrative.

The Obama Department of Justice targeted James Rosen of Fox News as a possible “criminal co-conspirator” in a leak investigation and seized phone records of AP reporters and editors in 2013. The IRS under Barack Obama systematically targeted the president’s political opponents.

And there are numerous examples of the Obama administration and the intelligence leaders loyal to the president politicizing intelligence. In collaboration with the Obama White House, CIA Director John Brennan and DNI James Clapper worked for more than five years to keep the documents captured in the Osama bin Laden raid from public view. (See here and here for the exhaustive details). During the heated debate over the Iran Deal, Clapper’s office rewrote the threat assessment on Iran to downplay Iran’s involvement in transnational terror.

Beyond that, we know that several high-ranking Obama administration officials were caught lying about the details of the Benghazi attacks in the weeks before the 2012 presidential election—and for several years after. . . .

Both sides are citing Clapper as the final word on the parts of the interview that support their case. He should not be considered the final word on anything. In addition to his involvement in the bin Laden documents cover-up and his office’s rewriting of the Iran threat assessment, Clapper was caught misleading Congress.

We won’t know the full truth about all of this anytime soon. And even as we see bits of the truth revealed will we—will the country—recognize it? Or will Democrats believe their Democrat truth and Republicans believe their Republican truth? There is reason for concern.

Well, yes. Yes there is.