I am attempting a rough chronology, with particular attention on keeping the separate actors straight.
So:
Summer, 2014, two unrelated developments occur. The House Select Committee on Benghazi, after spending two years vainly seeking to find some wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State on the Benghazi attack, does discover that she improperly sent State Department e-mails on a private server, and improperly deleted about half of the total and finally have a scandal to attack her election campaign.
At about the same time, the Dutch intelligence service, while attempting to hack into a Russian university building in Moscow, strike pay dirt and hack into the Russian Civilian Intelligence. They are able to observe its hacks in real time, and even to hack into one of its cameras and observe the individuals involved in action. This was, of course, an immensely valuable intelligence finding. Among other things, the Dutch were able to observe hacks on the United States. Working together, the two countries were able to thwart or expel an attempt to breach the US State Department. The Dutch also witnesses the Russian Civilian Intelligence hack into the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2015.
However, valuable though this information was, to date there is no public evidence that it had anything to do with Russian election interference, at least so far as I can tell. The Mueller investigation has issued two Russian indictments, one against the Troll Farm in St. Petersburg for its cyber propaganda and one against the Russian Military Intelligence for its hacking and release of DNC and Podesta e-mails. Both give a degree of detail that suggests someone has hacked into these activities as well. But neither indictment addressed the Russian Civilian Intelligence and therefore neither indictment could be based on the Dutch hack into Russian Civilian Intelligence.
This also has to be kept in mind in the face of accusations like this one that the Obama Administration knew about the Russian election interference as early as 2014 and did nothing, and for why most other narratives about the Obama Administration inaction begin in 2016. Certainly any attempt to counter Russian election interference in 2014 would not have been controversial. Republicans in 2014 would have been entirely happy to prevent the nomination of Donald Trump, who they viewed as both ideologically unreliable and having no chance of winning. The Dutch report hints that Dutch intelligence may have witnessed the Russian attack on the US election, but acknowledges that "[i]t's unknown what exact information the hackers acquire about the Russians."
At present, as far as we know, it was Russian Military Intelligence that published Democratic e-mails and the Troll Farm that spread anti-Hillary internet propaganda. The Russian Civilian Intelligence simply collected intelligence. To state the obvious, for the Russian intelligence to hack into the US government or a major political party is undesirable. It is a thing we will do our best to prevent, and to limit if it occurs. But it is also spycraft as usual. We expect the Russians to attempt to hack into our government, just as the Dutch hacked into theirs.
Russian Civilian Intelligence was apparently very aggressive in doing so. The Dutch report calls the attempt to hack into the State Department "the worst hack attack ever" on the US government, so clearly this went beyond normal espionage. But the difference was one of degree, not of kind. Valuable though it was, the Dutch hack thus far seems to be little more than a red herring.
In the meantime, members of the Troll Farm were tracking US social media sites in an attempt to understand US politics and also began visiting the US, posing as citizens, and collecting information. They talked to US activists and learned some of the intricacies of US politics such as "purple states" and the importance of targeting them. Mueller's indictment states that there were public reports on the trolls and their doings as early as June 2014, but their serious propaganda operations did not begin until 2016.
And keep in mind that Trump did not formally declare his candidacy and Hillary's e-mails did not become public knowledge until 2015. And Russian Military Intelligence did not enter into the picture until 2016.
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