Comment by bsenftner

Specifics of Russian activities, methods, and US intelligence awareness of same, all of which are relevant.

The fact of the arrest strongly suggests the documents themselves are accurate. If they don't reflect actual Russian activity, they appear to reflect US intelligence of such activity.

If accurate, the documents corroborate a general pattern of activity of election manipulation carried on from at least June of 2016 through November, which would be highly significant.

There is circumstantial evidence of vote tampering in at least North Carolina, based on unexpected vote-tally convergence differences based on precinct size (I'm not entirely sold on the story, though it seems to have some legs): http://www.votesleuth.org/north-carolina-2016-overview/

At a larger scale, this highlights weakensses in multiple elements of liberal democratic institutions, mechanisms, communications, and media, as well as, quite possibly, political bodies and individuals. Arguments which have been in large part theoretical of risks of voting machines, email, and end-to-end encryption are now looking to be substantial, actual, and potentially existential threats.

That's some prime meat in my register.

Nothing really bad yet. Allegedly Russians spear-phished user accounts of some people involved in the election, possibly stole documents and theoretically could attempt using this access to social engineer them into misconfiguring voting systems, installing malicious firmwares etc. but there is no evidence that they tried.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14490874

Apparently, countries conduct intelligence operations against each other.