Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA-28) is the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. He used to be a prosecutor and it shows. This is what he told PoliticusUSA recently about the French election and hacking:
In our election, and because of the decentralization of our voting system, my gravest fear was not that the Russians would hack the actual voting machines. Most were not online and many have paper trails. Nonetheless, I continue to think that any voter registrar that doesn’t maintain a paper trail is guilty of negligence.
Instead, I worried about the Russians dumping forged documents among the real, or worse still, adding fake paragraphs into real emails. Imagine the impact on an election if hackers inserted false information into a real email that suggested illegality by a candidate, and then published the document. If this was done close to an election, there would be no opportunity to disprove the forgery and who would believe the victim even if they could?
In France with Macron’s campaign, that nightmare scenario may be playing out, with hackers reportedly mixing fake documents in with the real and then dumping them. While we are still awaiting confirmation from French officials that there are indeed forgeries being dumped along with authentic stolen documents, this would represent yet another dangerous escalation of cyber interference in a Western nation’s democracy.
This was PoliticusUSA's analysis:
The fact that the MO was the same in both Clinton and Macron hacks connects some dots for members of Congress who are investigating the Russian interference to help Trump in the 2016 election.
Schiff referenced an area of investigation that will be horrible news for Putin and Trump. If US investigators can prove that the added false information into the hacked Clinton [emails] and that the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to develop and use this false information, it will be a smoking gun that would indicate that the Trump campaign worked with Putin to win the election.
It would also be quite horrible if Cambridge Analytica, the data firm run by Rebekah Mercer ends up implicated in the US election scandal. That is more likely than not at this point because a relationship between the Russians and Alta Bank has been established and Alta Bank and Cambridge Analytica had a business relationship in or about the same time frame as Russia. If the Mercers are implicated, de facto Steve Bannon is implicated, because Bannon is the Mercers golden boy and protege. Where Bannon is implicated, there goeth Trump.
This is getting more interesting by the day, no question about it.