As a former intelligence agent, here are my thoughts on the leaked emails.

In my professional opinion, the Russian intelligence services are not the ones responsible for the release of Democratic National Committee emails, nor are they responsible for the release of the emails of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta.

The story of how these emails came into public light is already public knowledge. We are this through some of the emails themselves. They weren't actually hacked at all. They were phished.

The best state sponsored computer network exploitation (CNE) hackers in the world generally come from the US, China, Russia and a few Western European nations like Britain and Germany. Russia has a good CNE apparatus. They don't use cheap methods and they do a good job of covering their tracks. In my opinion, they are nearly on par with the Chinese. For what it's worth, I do have professional experience in the collection of intelligence information against state sponsored CNE in East Asia, where I personally collected the IP addresses and names of six Chinese CNE operators in 2012.

The mainstream media is falling over themselves to delegitimize Trump's election victory (and his upcoming presidency) by convincing the public that the Russians put him in power by illegally hacking into the democrats' network and rigging the election. The problem with that lie is that there is zero evidence of this. The circumstances and methods don't even make sense for this to be a state sponsored CNE activity. We already KNOW that Podesta and the people he worked with shared their passwords with whoever conducted the phishing attacks by clicking on fake links sent to them in some of the emails that are now public record.

Professional, state sponsored CNE actors are not going to use phishing emails to obtain information at the highest levels. Once upon a time, this was a common method, but not so much in 2016, and not so much when the actors are Russian or European (the Chinese still try sometimes with low and mid level bureaucrats). Phishing attacks are fairly simple to either trace back to the sender or to simply close the "door" that the sender used once they've obtained access.

Aside from the Podesta group allowing their emails to be phished, we still have the recent claim by Craig Murray, a close associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, that he personally met with a DNC operative who was angry that Hillary Clinton had cheated Bernie Sanders out of the party nomination, and who handed him much of what we see on Wikileaks' DNC files. Who was this source? Was it Seth Rich, the young DNC worker who was murdered in Washington DC in what we were told was a botched robbery? He was previously a Bernie Sanders supporter. He was shot four times in the back while walking at night on a sidewalk, and his belongings, including his cash, were untouched.

I feel it is much more likely that these supposed Russian hacks are not hacks at all, but are in fact, LEAKS from the DNC itself and from disgruntled intelligence community agents aiming to expose the fraud and liar that is Hillary Clinton and her inner circle.

But we need to all be clear on something. It isn't the "hacks" or the "leaks" that doomed her campaign. It was her behaviors, her statements, her positions and the CONTENT of those leaked emails that lost her the election.