It's certainly beginning to look like Bloomberg got played. I don't know what the motivation would be for Bloomberg to deliberately deceive readers, but I can't help notice that the article came out at roughly the same time as Mike Pence was giving a speech whose central premise was that China is meddling in american politics, and all the attention currently focused on Russian hacking should be focused on Chinese hacking.

If this story actually is false the US government has plenty of incentive to have planted it.