Most people would assume that an adversary of our government would focus its espionage efforts on the Pentagon or the CIA, but true espionage is a little more nuanced than that. Foreign governments don’t just want to know about our secret operations. They want to know what our leaders (and potential leaders) are made of, and what makes them tick.
Which is why it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Russians successfully hacked into the computer networks that are related to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Currently however, there aren’t any significant details on what these spies learned from Trump’s campaign.
What we do know is that they thoroughly infiltrated the Democratic National Convention, and eavesdropped on emails and chat logs for about a year. No donor information was compromised, which indicates that these weren’t criminals, but were instead spies working on the behalf of the Russian government. What they went after instead, was a database filled with opposition research on Donald Trump. In fact, most experts agree that the hacker’s primary interest is in Trump, not Hillary.
Which makes sense, since the Russians probably know everything about Hillary already. She’s a career politician who has haunted the halls of American power for decades, and her temperaments, priorities, aspirations, and negotiation tactics, have become public knowledge over the years. They know exactly what they’re dealing with when it comes to Hillary. Trump on the other hand, is new to the political scene, and the Russians don’t really know what kind of president he’d be.