It continues to astonish that discussion of why hacking Democrats’ emails and making them public was so damaging to their presidential candidate is hardly part of the reporting on the hack.

Honest question: How important is it that the Dems' internal communications were so damaging?

— Justin Katz (@JustinKatzRI) December 14, 2016

I don’t believe it’s reasonable to claim that the Russians “handed the election to Trump.”  As I’ve already written, the hacked emails were only part of a wave of information coming out from different sources, and all of it painted basically the same picture of Hillary Clinton and her associates.  Picking the most objectionable of those sources for special attention is simply a way of avoiding a serious look at the substance of what we learned during the election.

But speaking of things we’re learning, I’d suggest that Americans should take a moment to compare the DNC’s handling of hacking, as described in the New York Times, including a lackadaisical response to FBI warnings, with the Wall Street Journal’s report that the same hackers didn’t get past the RNC’s filter.