Well, for one, Podesta was not targeted by these attacks. It wasn't some one off snatch and grab.
Podesta fell into a much larger net of attacks being carried out by the Russia. The Russians breached the emails of thousands of US military and NATO military personnel, government officials from the US and Europe, Russian dissidents as well as reporters and authors critical of Russia. They also targeted US authors, professors, and scientists with specialization in advanced military fields like aeronautics.
The DNC was hacked using totally different methods by a separate Russian group.
This was just the hacking they did. They simultaneously conducted a wide scale disinformation campaign targeted at social media using both human operatives and bot networks, backed up by their own state run media. Many of the twitter # during the election had Russian origins. For example, the one debate that Hillary clearly won, I think it was the second, a twitter hashtag originating from St. Petersburg sprung up #TrumpWon anyway.
