Furthermore, we have no visibility what US policymakers in the past have done with intelligence collected on political parties. We certainly have no current limits on what Trump can do with it; we’ve always given the President great discretion on such issues, in the name of ensuring a unified foreign policy. And there are plenty of ways Trump’s administration could intervene to help Le Pen beyond just leaking any derogatory information on Macron.
All this is not to say that GRU’s reported continued attempts to hack democratic targets is not a concern (indeed, I’m at least as worried that FSB is conducting similar intelligence collection without the same easily identifiable tracks).
But it is to say that, particularly in the era where Donald Trump sets this country’s foreign policy, we need to be a lot more mindful of NSA’s own far more considerable ability to steal information on democratic candidates.