in support.
Not to mention, what he could have said at the earlier point WAS said on October 6. The US government very definitively said that Russia was linked to the DNC and Podesta hackings. It was also very clearly said that Manafort had very strong ties to Russia --- and it was that story that caused him to be thrown out. It was covered that Trump changed the platform on Ukraine. What was NOT provable in mid 2016 was that the Trump campaign was working with Russia. That is what Mueller is investigating and which he may in 2018 make a clear case happened.
What Obama wanted with Ryan and McConnell was a joint bipartisan statement on what Russia was doing. Obviously, it would NOT accuse the republican campaign of colluding with Russia. The Republicans refused. What the Obama team then did was the strong intelligence statement -- about a month or two later. You could argue that that month made a difference, but the conventional wisdom is no one is listening in August. To my knowledge, neither Ryan or McConnell challenged the Intelligence Committee statement. Keeping things nonpartisan was key as can be seen by the paragraphs on the need to work with the 50 states to safeguard the actual voting.
In summer 2016, very very few people considered it even remotely possible that Trump could win. In fact, the Clinton campaign itself - even in October, after her numbers fell - was focused on a blowout victory rather than a safe narrow win, suggesting they absolutely were not worried about losing. (They had campaign events in places like Arizona and were spending big ad money there and in other red states. ) Consider that in that time frame, you had a growing list of Republican statesmen and pundits saying they would not vote for Trump.
Obviously, the path history took is disasterous from our point of view. Therefore, it is natural that EVERY decision made will be questioned as wrong. However, we can not know what the impact would have been had something different been done. Even continuing to push TPP that last year might have had more impact than not doing more on this. Comey's press conference when he closed the Clinton case, the letter on the Weiner laptop, and the final statement all likely had more impact. It is possible that even Clinton fainting - to some giving credibility to his comments that she was unhealthy - might have had more impact.
Here, it is not clear that ANY Obama action in spring/summer would have done more than what he did. It is entirely possible that On the domestic political side, Trump would have twisted a strong dennunciation of what Russia did to say that it showed that Obama and Secretary of State Clinton (yeah I KNOW who was SoS) were so weak that they allowed Russia to develop this ability and they did not keep America safe. (Seriously - we have all heard enough Trump that we could almost hear his loathsome voice making those charges.) In addition, the more publicly done, the more likely that there would have been some Russian response somewhere. Any blowup would hurt Clinton because she was alligned with Obama.
The OP includes a well thoughtout analysis of what the Obama administration was dealing with and it shows that they did take everything very seriously. The secrecy they operated under shows how grave and explosive they considered what was happening. Note that each organiation developed options (sanctions etc) that could be deployed. Obama himself spoke to Putin on the sidelines of an international conference.
Not to mention, in a close election EVERY factor can be said to have allowed the winner to win. There is no real way to decompose all the factors and mathematically define what the result would have been had something not happened. In 2016, there were a cascade of bad things that happened to the Clinton campaign - some within her control, some not. You also had the impact of decades of right wing expansion growing among people left behind by the economy, frightened by all the changes in society that we rejoice in. More from their need and longing for a leader than anything he ever did to earn their trust, they became almost cultlike followers of Trump. They delighted in his rudeness to everyone they disliked - especially Obama and Hillary Clinton. They vicariously enjoyed that he was not afraid to be rude and vulgar - oddly, considering that almost a strength.
In some ways, blaming mistakes on our side - either Obama's or Clinton and her campaigns is less scary than considering the very frightening reality. Nearly half the voters in this country voted for a man who could easily be seen as personally immoral, a pathological liar, and someone very prone to arguing for policies against everything this country ever stood for. Look at everything that was 100% known about Trump before the election and ask yourself what Obama could have said that would have caused many of those people to not vote for Trump.
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