re: Can someone briefly summarize this Russia thing?

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Well yes there is...

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Well, we are waiting...

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Sorry, but I've been trying to avoid politics as much as possible lately. How is it being suggested that Russia meddled in the election? What exactly could (or might) they have done that could have impacted results?

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Got some snacks? This might take a while but I'll try to keep it to the major points.

1. Hillary was predicted by almost everyone to win and win "bigly".

2. Hillary lost "bigly". This was especially telling in her losing in traditionally Democratic strongholds like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin & Michigan.

3. During the campaign emails from Clinton insider John Podesta were hacked and released as well as emails from the DNC itself.

3a. These emails revealed things like members of the media (CNN's Donna Brazile, as an example) feeding questions to Hillary ahead of Democratic primary debates as well DNC leadership (an example is their Chair, Debbie Wasserman-Shultz) purposely working behind the scenes to rig Democratic primary votes against Bernie and for Hillary.

3b. These emails were primarily leaked through Wikileaks. Wikileaks' founder Julian Assange has stated repeatedly they (at least the DNC emails) were given to Wikileaks by a DNC insider.

3c. The GOP was hacked as well and those emails were released on DCleaks but they contained no similar smoking guns.

3d. The NSA (one of the government agencies claiming this was a Russian government hacking job) has now been found to have the knowledge and ability to fake the codings they are claiming prove Russian involvement (the takeaway from this is that if the NSA could fake them, then why couldn't an independent hacker?)

4. Trump has done business in Russia before.

5. Because of parts 3 and 4, the media has taken the stance that Trump must have colluded with the Russian government to win the race through a hacking and misinformation campaign on social media.

5a. To this date although there have been hundreds (if not thousands) of stories claiming collusion between the Russian government and Trump's campaign, not a single piece of it has been presented to the public. At this point it's still "unnamed sources say" or "it's possible that".

5a1. The current lead story on just about every station is about the FBI questioning Jared Kushner (Trump's son-in-law and member of Trump's administration) over his meeting with the Russian ambassador and a Russian banker in December.

That pretty much sums it up.