Back to the OP, the title of this thread is, once again, not reflective of the facts. There's always been evidence that the attack on the DNC server likely came from Russia. There's no doubt that if Podesta didn't click on a phishing email that apparently came from Russia, we probably wouldn't be reading about his emails.
Nor do I think you can go as far as Trump and say that the publication of emails had ZERO effect on folks thought processes when they went to the polls.
However, there's no way that anyone can claim "the election was corrupted". Hillary did ultimately win the popular vote, after all. So if there was an effort to "corrupt the election" - something that no one thinks was possible anyway since there was no hacker access to the voting machines - the effort was pretty lame.
I think this piece from
Politifact does a pretty reasonable job of cutting through the crap:
"The presidential election, with its national constituency, is decided by multiple, interrelated causes, all of which were necessary but not sufficient," said Kyle Saunders, a Colorado State University political scientist. Referring to such factors as the candidates’ personalities and messages as well as the general political environment, Saunders said that "no one determinate cause can be offered as ‘the’ explanation, and doing so is a fool's errand."
Saunders agreed that one doesn’t have to believe that hacking did affect the election to say comfortably that Trump is wrong to say it absolutely didn’t affect the election -- there's simply no way of knowing either way with any certainty that something affected the outcome.
He added that while a reasonable case can be made that the hacking did help Trump, that's informed speculation -- not certainty -- and said there’s no way to know how big a factor it may have been compared to other factors.
Also, right from Clapper:
Clapper’s most direct remark at the Senate hearing on this issue came in this exchange with the panel’s chairman, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.:
McCain: "So really, what we're talking about, is if they succeeded in changing the results of an election, of which none of us believe they were, that would have to constitute an attack on the United States of America because of the effects, if they had succeeded, would you agree with that?"
Clapper: "First, we cannot say -- they did not change any vote tallies or -- or anything of that sort."
McCain: "Yeah, I'm just talking about…"
Clapper:
"And we have no -- we have no way of gauging the impact that -- certainly the intelligence community can't gauge the impact it had on the choices the electorate made. There's no way for us to gauge that."
Was there influence of popular opinion by releasing info from the DNC? Sure. Was it purposeful? Very likely. Did it help Trump and hurt Hillary? With some folks, sure. But some of those folks were pre-disposed to be influence by that info one way or another anyway. In other words, some folks pre-disposed to support Hillary were possibly even MORE invigorated to vote for her because of this.
The BIG question: was all of this specifically designed and intended to help Trump? As I've said all along, NO WAY TO KNOW, and as Clapper suggests, even if we knew there's NO WAY TO ASSESS THE IMPACT one way or another.
Let the retaliatory chips fall where they may over the hacking. We probably need to be pretty careful with retaliation anyway since the US is engaged in electronic surveillance and hacking other countries infrastructure as well. But as a story that relates to the actual outcome of the 2016 election, Case Closed.