>>>Like I said above; HRCs reputation is rather inconsequential at this point. Should I dismiss her statement that specifically Putin himself was involved because of a personal grudge against her? I'm not so sure that it is false, nor do I think it's that important in this context, so I can't comment any further. However, the accusations that foreign interference occurred are serious, especially now that both CIA and FBI are confirming them as substantive.
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>Well, you might want to go and look at the actual statements by FBI and CIA including why they blame the Russians- because according to them, only a sovereign power is capable of hacking this effectively and they recognize patterns attributed to Russian-sponsored groups. Meanwhile the Republicans deny they were hacked, which is a crucial part of the interpretation that the intent was to damage HRC by only publishing one side of the hacked material. Wikileak's explanation was simpler: they couldn't publish evidence of Republican collusion and undermining of democracy because they had none, only HRC's. If that's true then the "crime" attributed to Russia is to find and publish evidence of collusion and bad behavior, not selective publication to hurt one side over another. Unless the FBI has better evidence that the Republicans were hacked, this isn't going anywhere.

About the only thing safe to say is that no material of Podesta "quality" hit the US public before election from R mail troves ;-)

If the hack was some foreign gov operation, smart operators might sprinkle in false leads to point to different origin.
If the hack really was Putin-ordered, I'd expect at least an attempt to hack R as well:
- that might be "leaked" to counterbalance public opinion, if "true" Russian hack efforts were identified and created a big hoopla with voters, not MSM
- that might have not succeded
- that might have succeded and no dirt unearthed (hardest to believe...)
- that might have succeded and material was held back to have some goodwill early on / leverage later: might be dangerous with Trump. but normal procedure otherwise