Sorry you feel so misunderstood and mischaracterized, lad. The only person I know who is equally misunderstood and mischaracterized is ....me. I too have had to take the step, several times, of stating my positions on much of this explicitly. Gets old, doesn't it?

You are more reasonable than many others, and so I direct a lot of my responses to you while ignoring the others as best I can.

Russia probably did the hacking. Wikileaks did the publishing. The question is why? For Russia, the assumption by antiTrumpeters is that they did it to influence the election toward Trump for some reason. But there are better possibilities. One is simply that they hated Hillary. She alienated Putin personally.
Another is that the DNC stuff was so much easier to get. A third is that they were just trying to sow discord and polarize our electorate, and to freeze our government into inaction on the off chance that Trump won. If so, working perfectly. If so, who is playing into their hands now?

Nobody gave Trump a snowball's chance in hell of winning. Do we really think that the Russians' polling is so much better than ours that they noticed, months before the election, that Trump just needed a little push, and publishing a few emails without editing would provide that tiny but adequate push? Damn, they are good. And still, the question is, why would they prefer Trump over Clinton? other than the personal animus that Putin had for her, of course. Did they expect him to lift the sanctions? Get out of the way in syria? That is the quid pro quo that is missing.

The French election is different primarily in the timing.

Rail against the Russians playing us all you want. i will join you. Russians, keep away!!!! But when it comes to the "nefarious" conspiracy theories pushed by some, they are quite simply, ridiculous.

There is also " no evidence that they have actually succeeded" as you say, in influencing THIS election. Zero. Nada. None. Hillary's excuses to the contrary, I can think of a hundred reasons that had more impact than the emails. "Deplorables" comes to mind. Benghazi comes to mind. Stagnant wages come to mind. The dissatisfaction with the status quo and "more of the same" comes to mind. But Hillary losing was an upset of cataclysmic nature. I didn't expect it. There has to be an explanation why things didn't go as expected. Has to be that somebody cheated, right? Has to be. No other way to explain it. Either that or witchcraft.

But as I have each of the other times I have explained my position here, if one tries to tell the story in such a way that the investigations are warranted, they don't hold water. Might as well have John Cleese testify that Trump turned him into a newt. I keep asking for the narrative of what yall think happened, and all I get is comments about smoke, or incompetency, or bad attitudes,, but never any coherent narrative of what it is that you think happened that investigation will show to be true.

What's wrong with bringing up Hillary? She was the loser in whose behalf all this angst is being played out. she was the candidate that had over a quarter century of public and private actions that played into the loss, actions that are defended by many who attack Trump. It is legitimate to point out inconsistencies in people's positions. maybe the word hypocrisy does not have to enter into it.

I feel your pain, Lad.