Water Dog wrote:Put it this way. If you brought your "evidence" into a court room and it was given a fair cross examination, no jury would find Russia guilty.
That is not the way that governments make, or should make, decisions about the way that other governments are acting. There are two reasons for that:
1. The Russian government is not a citizen of the US entitled to the protection of the law, which often prefers to see the probably guilty go free rather than see the possibly innocent punished. That provision is there in part because of the huge disparity of power between an individual citizen and the government's legal machinery. Russia, on the other hand, is another player on the world stage, of equal status with the USA. Trump's 'America First' slogan would suggest that is up to the Russian government to safeguard its own interests, while the US concentrates on its own.
2. Governments charged with protecting their national interest are obliged to act on a prudential basis, not the criminal justice basis of 'proof beyond a reasonable doubt' to protect their citizens against major threats and subversion. In the same way that a business is entitled to withdraw from dealings with another company that its directors simply strongly suspect may be cheating it, even if they have no proof at all, a government may reasonably (and sometimes should) take measures against another government that it strongly suspects is acting in a way that constitutes a threat to the integrity of its political processes.