> Neither of those square with observed data

What is the observed data? Anyone who had a VPS in Russia could have been responsible for the data that is currently known to the public. The intelligence agencies claim there is additional data but it appears unlikely that there actually is.

> Trumpistas

I think it's important not to let distaste for Trump interfere with analysis of this issue. Trump attempts to maximize all publicity in his favor, which is why he thanked "the Russians" for leaking the HRC emails. Just as many lobbyists for Ukraine hire American officials as consultants, Russian firms have in some cases hired former American officials and influencers to help with business/political goals in the US. This is just a normal phenomenon and not in and of itself cause for alarm.

> having been repeatedly caught out brazenly lying about significant events

They found themselves in an unexpected situation where the Russia story got legs that they had not anticipated. Some lies had been told thinking that the non-story would go away faster, and some Trump affiliates were caught in those lies. As unappealing as it is, the lies were probably the right strategy at the time for Trump, since his political enemies had made the Russia story front page news for a period of weeks.

> Care to elaborate? What do you call it?

Russia has first world state actor hacking capability. There is a decent chance that a Stuxnet-like worm has deeply penetrated many of the firms that make voting machines used in US elections. If anything, evidence of minor pentesting artifacts on the web servers of a few voting machine companies ought to make us think Russian involvement is less likely rather than more likely.

The stuff we saw in the past year (phishing, pentesting) requires such little sophistication that moderately interested teenager could have done it. Might Russia have some sort of after school program for patriotic teens? Certainly it might, but any such program would not be considered likely to have any impact other than the remote possibility of a lucky chain of events.

I think it's relevant to consider "Russia" the government vs any of the millions of moderately tech-savvy Russian people who might have been involved in content farming or low-sophistication hacking/phishing.

Since the probability of one of those attacks succeeding is so low (and likely had nothing to do with the 2016 US election outcome) having people conducting those attacks on Russian soil would much more likely be viewed by the Russian government as a liability, analogous to someone in Alaska launching home made missiles into Russia trying to "help" US interests.

Only in the most myopic, partisan political mindset can anyone take seriously the notion that somehow "The Russians" knew how to leverage < $200K in ad spend on Facebook and Twitter to shift the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election. It's just a ludicrous claim, and one that anyone actually doing marketing or involved in budgeting for social media marketing would laugh at without hesitation. It relies on the same sort of fiction that existed during the cold war that imagined super-genius Russian scientists creating super-weapons that would wipe out the US. It's useful for fear-mongering, but much more a figment of the imagination than based in reality.