>>What have you done to the real JR? The JR a year ago would have taken much less at face value, esp. if espionage is hinted at ;-)

I'm questioning all of it. The Russian boogeymen is invoked, so all we need now is claims that the specter of Fidel Castro cast his vote repeatedly in Minnesota, followed by accusations that Trump Tower is in fact a WMD cache. No thanks. Lets have some credible proof!

>>Why not suspect a russian paid informant in this chain - which might be the easiest way to get access, as infiltration studies suggest?

It's all association. I "get" that there's a lot of competent Eastern European hackers but it's a long jump from "the hacker uses the same tool as Cozy Bear, Cozy Bear is Russian and associated with the old KGB, so it must be Putin!" That's nowhere good enough.

For a start, there are 2 separate hacks: there's the prolonged hack of the DNC and there's the lifting of Podesta's emails.

Apparently the lifting of Podesta's emails was achieved by phishing, meaning any script kiddie could have done it. IOW there's no logical reason to blame the dirty Ruskies for the Podesta leaks, or to justify the current tower of blaming and grievance built on it. So unless proper evidence is produced soon, people are entitled to conclude that this is just another of the deceptions shown by Wikileaks, this time trying to shroud incompetent personal email hygiene by blending with a totally different DNC hack from a proper black hat who needed to sneak software onto the server and hide it over months. It's very possible that a Russian group did that, but apparently the exploit was in place for a very long time rather than a discrete recent event aiming to destabilize the election.