That corruption was exploited by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, but not necessarily to Trump’s benefit. The fact is that Putin has next to no leverage over Trump, which has been illustrated time after time over the past year or so. The only candidate that Putin would’ve had leverage over was Hillary Clinton, as I’ll explain below.
The reasons that Putin would’ve had leverage over Hillary would be her email server (which was unencrypted for the first 3 months of 2009) and both his and his cronies’ donations to the Clinton Foundation. Donations to the Clinton Foundation would’ve been a backdoor to a President Hillary. Putin knew this and could use both the server and foundation to blackmail her into doing his bidding.