Go read time.com report on Putin and Clinton regarding the 2011 Russian elections.  She poked the bear and he poked back.  Nothing to do with Trump being a Serbian candidate much less a Putin stooge as you toss out so liberally.  

I spend my entire USAF career during the cold war - the then Soviets and now Russia under former KGB Putin is not a friend of myself or the Republican party.  

There are claims - which you and others will poo-poo due to the source that the Podesta's emails were provided by an internal DNC/Dem source due to their feelings that the primaries were "rigged" for Clinton.

The fact that the American right is reactionary and tends to be aquiescent to traditional authority, is just an added cultural bonus from the Putin regime's point of view.

U.S. intelligence officials now believe with "a high level of confidence" that Russian President Vladimir Putin became personally involved in the covert Russian campaign to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, senior U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.

But since you seem to like speculation.

With respect to potential computer intrusion by hostile actors, we did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton's personal e-mail domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked. But, given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess that we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence. We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial e-mail accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account. We also assess that Secretary Clinton's use of a personal e-mail domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent. She also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal e-mail account.

Link

IOW Clinton allowed Putin to read classified material.

kdog: "[B]ut what right do we have to b*tch about foreign influence when we the people's CIA has been fixing elections, supporting brutal dictators, backing or instigating a coup d'état of duly elected governments for over 60 years around the globe."

How about the fact that the target in this instance was our own country? (Never mind the fact that this Russian cyber-intel operation specifically targeted my own party with the intent to undermine its viability.)

As deplorable and unethical as American meddling in the internal affairs of other countries has been for 200 years going all the way back to the U.S.'s deliberate undermining of Spanish sovereignty in Florida, this particular discussion in this thread isn't about what the we as a country did to Guatemala and Iran in 1954 or to Chile in 1973, or even to the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893.

Simply put, because those otherwise-worthy historical topics have nothing whatsoever to do with what just happened in the here and now, any contemporaneous debate about them offers no practical solutions to our current dilemma. As such, it's best that we save that argument for another place and time.

Rather, our immediate concern should be focused on what may possibly be the biggest preach of our country's national security and integrity in either of our lifetimes, which has real world consequences both immediate and long-term, particularly with regards to the preservation of peace in Europe.

And if the best you can muster here in response to a politically destabilizing cyberattack upon your own country is a banal "just karmic desserts," accompanied by a nonsensical demand for a U.S. apology that you know as well as the rest of us isn't likely to happen anytime in the foreseeable future, then I suggest that you go back to your room, light some incense, fire up the bong, and zone out to some old Melanie Safka and Tim Buckley albums.

Because in my opinion, that's about all such an opinion is presently good for -- a reason on your part to once again set a bar so high as to avoid personal commitment, and thus further preserve your own ethereal political sensibilities.

Sorry, but "Yeah, I'm with you -- well, sorta, kinda, maybe" doesn't cut it here. If you don't want to stake a personal position, fine. But don't expect me to respect that choice when you then use the occasion to first undercut your own country by offering historical rationales to excuse the Russians for what they just did to us, and then chalk it all up to some of our own accumulated bad cosmic blooey.