What if Obama had had the CIA release its assessment of what the Russians were doing? Would not the Republicans and a good chunk of the press have claimed that he was doing so to tilt the election to Clinton? It was obvious to any thinking person, and a lot of National Security Republicans said so, but having the President who as a sitting President was taking an active role in Clinton's campaign he might well have been savaged for doing it.
Clinton would have blown Trump away, even without the Access Hollywood tape, absent either Comey - starting with his out of bounds comments in his first press conference and his violating all Justice Dept guidelines in his Oct. 28 announcement about reexamining the emails issue - or what the Russians were doing, not only with hacking emails and giving them to Wikileaks but clearly also a LOT of the fake news put into circulation.
But Obama was damned either way. Now he is getting slammed by Democrats for not getting this out before the election.
But what if he had? Imagine the reaction in the press, and from Republicans?
We did not have a fair election for a lot of reasons — voter suppression especially in WI in some cases in violation of Federal Court order, inadequate resources for election purpose in Detroit (the counting machines), a media that really distorted its coverage in a way that really helped Trump, Comey — but then there is the very real fact that a foreign government was trying to affect the outcome of our election in a way that favored their interests.
The only thing I can say, besides the fact that it is not even clear that Trump was actually elected, is that we were hoist by our own petard — the number of times the US has intervened in ways to influence the elections in other countries exceeds the number of fingers and toes that I have.
But right now it means we are fucked.