There was a good article yesterday in Cipher Brief by Steve Hall who, according to his bio, worked at CIA for a long time. He points to what Putin gets from trying to influence the U.S election. His view is that Putin believes weakening the political system in the U.S strengthens Russia's position in the world; discrediting the U.S intellgence services benefits his; and he gets more stature for the cyber programs run by Russia by doing it. That seems like the likely reasons why they would go ahead with a program that was sure to be discovered.
However, what is hard to believe is that the Russians actually thought they would be caught and took the calculation of that risk into account. Whichever intelligence service was into the Democratic National Committee first ( NSA still says "foreign actor" rather than Russia) had been there for a year and was discovered only when the GRU started to hack around in the same system. If they were Russian, they were exposed by their own sister intelligence agency. That shows a lack of coordination which is believable. It happens now and again with any country with more than one intelligence service. But, my guess would be that there were more than one country's intelligence services in those files, and that we will never know how many actually got information from them, or which one passed the information to Wikileaks.
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