>Frankly, I find the suggestion that telling voters more about their candidate constitutes 'interference' to be repugnant
Really? By this argument, I take it you believe political candidates' email (or cough tax returns) should automatically be made public?
Much as I agree with transparency, I think we need to recognize that everyone--including political candidates--has some right to private communications.
> but assuming that we are going to engineer a scandal about this, we need to ask whether the Russians released that information to Wikileaks?
The publicly released circumstantial evidence about Russian backing of "Guccifer 2.0" is fairly convincing, I would say. But (contrary to your claim above) the media have not "jumped to the conclusion" that the Russians were the ones who released the leaked emails; the FBI claimed* Russia was not merely behind the attacks but behind the leaks.
You all can debate the merits of trusting intelligence agencies or not, but the situation you described--in which the IC only suggested Russia was behind some intrusions but not the leaks--is not in fact the world we live in.
* http://www.wsj.com/articles/top-russian-officials-shift-away...
No, they don't, unless you see the need for them to act against our interests without our knowleddge because markets or something, or see some sort of right for them to rule others.
What about non-email communication? Face-to-face conversations should all be public? Does this extend to classified briefings? Should, for example, discussions of "Olympic Games" have been public before it was executed?
It's like in Germany where they're up in arms against this and seem to have forgotten the revelation that the USA was tapping Merkel's phone...
Except that point 7 isn't at all controversial. EVERYONE hacks EVERYONE ELSE in cyber-espionage; even Canada was probably hacking the lame-ass security DNC email server, if only to fill a dossier. Remember that Clinton was set to be the next president of the United States; it is very much in Russia's (and anyone else's) best interest to know as much about her and her team as they can learn. It's the job of American spooks to prevent this, and they completely fucked it up.
Frankly, I find the suggestion that telling voters more about their candidate constitutes 'interference' to be repugnant; but assuming that we are going to engineer a scandal about this, we need to ask whether the Russians released that information to Wikileaks? All of the evidence (ie what Wikileaks says) says otherwise.