Read the original CloudStrike report. Not the government report but the private security firm report. The government report is really just a restatement of that report. You don't track hackers for a decade to suddenly be wrong because of a governments political stance.
The CrowdStrike report, and subsequent interview in Christian Science Monitor of CrowdStrike CTO Dmitri Alperovitch [1], stated in June 2016 that they had low to medium confidence that the Russian government was involved with either Russian group detected.
The groups haven't changed; why are we so certain in December of Russian involvement that we're willing to sanction, if we knew everything we needed to know in June? The only evidence that they are associated with the government is a claim by FireEye that they "work during normal Russian business hours" of 8am-8pm, and that their targets (known targets I should say) would be of strategic importance to the Russian government - I bet if you asked any hacker in any country whether they'd like to hack the US government, they would tell you hell yes.
There are two possibilities here: 1, the US government is drawing this conclusion and imposing sanctions based on weak circumstantial evidence or 2, they have actual evidence but won't even hint at what it is. Even during the Iraq WMD debacle (which this ordeal is drawing heavy comparison with) they said they had satellite photos.
> All I said was no evidence has been made public by the government
Except that's _explicitly_ not what you said. You said:
>still no public evidence that Russia leaked the DNC and Podesta's e-mails?
Your original claim was that there was _no public evidence_. When that claim was challenged, you pretended your claim was about what evidence was provided by the government.
Sorry, my intention wasn't to move the goalposts, I actually misspoke the second time. Obviously I don't care where the evidence comes from. I did mean "no public evidence" and then the parent made it political, somehow.
I did read the RPT-APT28 report by FireEye on APT28 (all fifty-something pages, surprise!). It did convince me that APT28 has political motivations. What's the connection between that and DNC/Podesta? I don't know, because there's no public evidence on that (that I know of).
