For Podesta, the first sentence on wikipedia is "In March 2016, the personal Gmail account of John Podesta..." Unless you believe that google employees pulled an inside hack, then it makes more sense that the Podesta hack was external. The common story is that Podesta receieved a phishing email, was told it was legitimate by IT, and gave up his password to a phishing site.
As for the "long enough to download that much data" idea, that's pretty much a nonissue with high speed connections.
I was at a particular military base around a decade ago, and they (way above the base structure) decided to conduct a test to see how long it’d take to compromise the network, and they sent this type of phishing email to one single person within the base communications network. He opened it up within three minutes of receiving it....it rooted itself in the network system, and they had full control within an hour. After that period, there was a massive amount of change to occur.
I sense that the political players are five to ten years behind, and Podesta was just one single individual who did this....out of 50,000 DC players.
Podesta’s team fell for a phishing scam and surrendered the password.
Yes, Podesta’s email was a separate issue from the DNC server. The story is he fell for a fishing email but there are loads of possibilities. I read that his password was ‘password’. So who knows - it could have been read over his shoulder, or he borrowed someones computer and left the password autofill, or he was keylogged as he used a network computer at the DNC etc.
The point is while they may be separate incidents they aren’t necessarily separated by motive or persons. It could be the same person, or not. But all together the DNC leak, the Podesta hack, and the Hillary homebrew server (not to mention the little reported Awan Brothers controversy) together create the appearance of extreme recklessness when it comes to security - at the least. Even less reported was Hillary’s involvement with the Russian Skolvoko espionage scheme. The funny think is that while the media did report on these things as embarrassing foibles, they were incredibly soft and forgiving, and even Comey shrugged it all off.
But the psychology of the appearance of it all must have weighed heavy on them, because they really went heavy artillery in trying to project their weakness and culpability onto Trump. Trump taunted her about all this on the campaign trail with jokes about “Putin, release the emails!”, and that gave them the opening to try to pin it all on Russia and then try to tie Trump collusion into it.
PS: there are a number of articles explaining why the technical and physical data show it is extremely unlikely that the DNC hack was done via an overseas computer.