That, imho, would put Mueller's entire investigation in jeopardy as the intensity for impeachment ramps (as we saw when the story broke) up until it happens. Then Mueller's effectively out of business. Again, imho, the special counsel has more to investigate and doesn't want to be derailed at this time. The problem is that the criminal and counterintelligence parts of the investigation are so intertwined that's it's nearly impossible to seperate the two.
Issuing such a convoluted, very carefully worded statement when a short, one sentence, "this story is completely inaccurate" response would do says a lot, imho. Buzzfeed's editor was on with Maddow and said that the special counsel had sent over transcripts of Cohen's Congressional testimony, so they didn't just ignore the story. They certainly could have told Buzzfeed the story was not accurate or completely accurate when it was described to them, corrected them or asked Buzzfeed not to publish. They did none of those and waited a day to issue any kind of statement at all.
It's hard to believe that the information gathered as part of the search warrants issued for Cohen's home, office and business didn't sweep up incriminating evidence in various written and electronic forms. Cohen had something like 16 phones/blackberrys. We know there was a subsequenst supoena issued to the Trump Organization for records as well. Cohen has testified under oath at his sentencing hearing that Trump personally directed him to make hush money payments. We know that Trump was the target of a counterintelligence operation started 2+ years ago. We know there are pages and pages of redacted material in the indictments and sentencing memos. I suspect Buzzfeed was able to put all these pieces together.
As for the sources, there aren't just attorneys and FBI agents involved in these cases. There are tangential people, too. The description of the sources being "read into" the investigation stuck out to me. Being "read into" something that's classified means you have a need to be able to see, hear or handle some aspect of, but are not necessarily involved in everything. Think about all the people making copies of evidence, collating evidence, providing documents to defendents during discovery, entering data into electronic court databases, typing indictments and so on. Don't forget defense teams know what evidence the gov't has on their client(s) as well as what was was seized from search warrants. That's plenty of potential leak points.
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