Trump/Russia: The Importance of Not Mixing Things Up

One of the things that can easily lead to confusion in the Trump/Russia investigation is that there are multiple things going on that are easy to confuse with each other.

To state the most obvious, there three sets of e-mails swirling around Hillary Clinton.  These must be kept separate and not confused with each other.

1. Hillary Clinton's State Department e-mails.  Hillary Clinton used a private server to send State Department e-mails.  This was doubly improper.  First, the private server was not properly secured and was vulnerable to hacking by adversaries, including Russia, although no evidence has emerged so that that the server actually was hacked.  It also looked like an attempt to evade disclosure laws.  When asked to turn over her e-mails, Hillary deleted some 30,000, or about half the total, saying they were personal.  We will call these the State Department e-mails.
2. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) really was hacked by the Russians, and its e-mails published by Wikileaks.  We will call these the DNC e-mails.  They contained private but not classified information and are completely different from the State Department e-mails.  
3. Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta was also hacked and his e-mails were published by Wikileaks.  We will call these the Podesta e-mails.  Neither the DNC e-mails nor the Podesta e-mails revealed any sort of criminality, but they did show politicians behaving like politicians, which is never edifying.  

There were also separate Russian agencies involved in the hacking and attempt to subvert the election:

1. The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, whose hackers operated under the name of "Cozy Bear."  The SVR/Cozy Bear operated out of Moscow and hacked into the DNC as early as 2015.  It did not, however, publicly disclose what it found.  We will call it Rusia's Civilian Intelligence.
2. The Russian Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU, its military intelligence.  Under the name of "Fancy Bear," its hackers broke into the DNC server and Podesta's system and turned the contents over to Wikileaks.  We will call it Russian Military Intelligence.
3. The Internet Research Agency (IRA) is a purportedly private Russian company operating out of St. Petersburg that ran Russia's troll farms stirring up trouble both in the US and other countries.  We will call it the troll farm.

Presumably if one goes high enough in the Kremlin, someone was aware of all three operations.  However, to the best of our knowledge, the operating level personnel were not aware of what any other agency was doing.

Keeping these actors and e-mails straight is important to understanding what happened.