Conversely, there are ample reasons for the intelligence community to pin it on their historic enemy, rather than the more likely Murder on the Orient Express scenario where absolutely everyone paying attention hacked every grotesquely unsecured setup, or the insider-threat scenario.
Hey, whatever happened to Seth Rich?
And if the "intelligence community" isn't actively targeting insiders at least as a pure pen-testing contingency, why aren't they?
What if the source is an actual human asset within the malicious organization?
What if the source is a compromised server of the Russian organization?
What if the source is a legal wiretap on a bad actor?
That's why eg in World War II, the allies only acted on Enigma intercepts if there was a plausible alternate source.
So my inference is that they're lying about having sufficient evidence to definitively point at the rooskies, or they're being reckless with sourcing.
I feel like given the amount of info necessary for security clearance & the fact most politicians live and die with their phones means the intelligence agencies have them all pretty much dead to rights.
My personal favorite part of the article, couple paragraphs after that quote:
"We are approaching the point in this case where there are only two reasons for why people say there’s no good evidence,” Rid told me. “The first reason is because they don’t understand the evidence—because the don’t have the necessary technical knowledge. The second reason is they don’t want to understand the evidence.”