How Russia used stolen data to confuse, discourage & anger voters, disrupt Hillary's campaign strategy, interfere in the debates, commandeer the media discussions & mislead Comey into taking a public posture.

All with the direct assistance of the Trump campaign, which knowingly took on a Russian asset at the highest level in the campaign, and continued to use his assistance long after Trump had been briefed by the NSA/CIA on Russian interference & subterfuge in the elections.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/01/how-russia-helped-to-swing...

The election was stolen through highly illegal means, including theft, known conspiracy with foreign powers, and the direct & indirect of foreign money & workforce. The quicker we reverse our "but Hillary ran a bad campaign" and take on that basically *no one* can easily run against a full-on Russian effort to influence an election (as evidenced by numerous other disrupted elections around the world), we'll start framing our actions and re-shuffling our attitudes in a much more useful & serious way.

My favorite laugh line was:

Philip Howard, the director of the Oxford Internet Institute, in England, agrees that the Russian interference could have been decisive, but he is less convinced that the stolen analytics were key. He told me, “It’s plausible, but the Russians wouldn’t have needed the Clinton campaign—they could just as easily have targeted the network of Bernie Sanders supporters.”

which of course they *did* target the network of Bernie Sanders supporters.

Also, reading a side interview with Martha Raddatz, describing how the press is "learning to question itself more":

Raddatz reflected on co-moderating the 2016 presidential debate that took place just 36 hours after the release of Trump’s controversial remarks on “Access Hollywood.”

“None of us prepared to talk about an ‘Access Hollywood’ tape,” she said. “I really had to calm myself down and say: ‘Do not be overwhelmed by this. Do not let it. Ask the questions people would want to hear.’”

So instead of asking Trump about Pussygate, she asked Hillary about a misquoted/out-of-context from one of the stolen emails:

one of the moderators, Martha Raddatz, relayed a question submitted by a voter: Did Clinton think that it was acceptable for a politician to be “two-faced”? The question referred to a leaked passage from one of Clinton’s previously unreleased paid speeches; Russian hackers had given the passage to WikiLeaks, which posted it two days before the debate. In the speech, Clinton had cited Steven Spielberg’s film “Lincoln” as an example of how politicians sometimes need to adopt different public and private negotiating stances. The point was scarcely novel, but the debate question—which took her words out of context, omitted her reference to the movie, and didn’t mention that Russian operatives had obtained the speech illegally—made Clinton sound like a sneaky hypocrite. When Clinton cited “Lincoln” in order to defend the statement, Trump pounced.

“She got caught in a total lie!” Trump said. “Her papers went out to all her friends at the banks—Goldman Sachs and everybody else. And she said things, WikiLeaks, that just came out. And she lied. Now she’s blaming the lie on the late, great Abraham Lincoln!”

So instead of stressing on the scandalous news the day before about Trump - both Russian collusion and his awful attitude towards women - she stresses on a comment out of a stolen email made in context of a movie observation, painting a rather anodyne "people do things & hold somewhat different opinions in private than they do in public", (or at least are willing to move out of the box & comfort zones in private negotiatons) observation - made more poignant perhaps by Trump's "I love women" comments as belied by grab-em-by-the-pussy, sleeping around on his wives & paying them off to hundreds of thousands, and walking in on underaged girls changing (as well as picking his contestant faves to "come upstairs" - but Raddatz didn't make that observation, because she was in the press box cheering the "successful businessman Trump" rather than asking the tough questions to get behind his bullshit).