Yes, American citizen here.

With the lack of any publicly available evidence, I guess the reasoning behind it largely comes down to trust. You either trust the government on this or you don't. On this issue, I do, but again, I wouldn't fault you for disagreeing. If I had to elaborate, I'd say:

The cost of being caught in a lie is sufficiently damaging to the organization that makes the claim. What benefit do they gain by making such a claim? does the risk of getting caught in a lie outweigh the benefit? I just don't see the lie as being a risk worth taking.

There have been many times in the past where 'blaming it on Russia' could have been politically convenient. If you do it too often, you become the boy-who-cries-wolf. Would the risk of reputation loss outweigh the benefits gained by telling the lie? again, I don't see the lie as being worth the risk.

>What benefit do they gain by making such a claim?

Not losing the most important general election of this first half-century?

What do you mean, losing? The intelligence community isn't up for election.

The intelligence community feather their nests through control of the executive. They've been collecting skeletons in Clintonian closets for decades, so they own HRC as completely as they owned GWB. They might actually have some shit on Trump as well, but he DGAF. They can imagine pissing him off enough to hurt their own pocketbooks.

This might actually explain KGB/FSB's apparent preference for Trump: the enemy of one's enemy...

So you reckon Trump has no skeletons? And even if he doesn't, I think it's clear he would be child's play to manipulate. Basically if the intelligence community is as corrupt as you suspect, you're in trouble who ever wins the election.

Certainly, this election offers little hope for curbing the surveillance state or the military-industrial complex. Trump is probably an awful person, but he doesn't really cultivate a different image from that on the stump. Even when his opponents think they have a real bombshell (he doesn't respect women!!1! how could anyone have guessed based on his marital history?!?), it seems to have little effect on his popularity.

I only intended to point out that various agencies do have interests in the outcome of elections.

I'd argue that Trump's recent issues with women have actually hurt him a lot. RealClearPolitics runs a poll of polls, where they average dozens of polls. While any individual poll may have oddities that cause it to lean left or right, averaging the polls reduces the odds of a few outliers throwing everything off.

Before the first debate Trump was down by 1 point (but trending upward) according to the RealClearPolitics average. That's within the margin of error on even the largest polls, meaning he was basically tied with Hillary. Then the Alicia Machado story broke at the end of the first debate, and his poll numbers went down to about -4. Then the bus tape came out, and he's now at roughly -7. That's well outside the margin of error. In fact, his poll numbers are now at the point where no one has ever won the presidency while being this far down so close to the election. He might still pull it off, but he's got a steep road ahead of him.

So he's gone from basically tied, to the point where he'd need something huge to happen in order to win. The biggest stories in that period of time were Alicia Machado and the bus tape. Most of the polls give detailed demographic breakdowns. He's dropped a little with men, but most of the damage was with women, where he's seen a double-digit loss of support in some polls.

Suspect?

What do you mean if?