Brennan later argued that Putin and his top aides had two goals: “Their first objective was to undermine the credibility and integrity of the US electoral process. They were trying to damage Hillary Clinton. They thought she would be elected, and they wanted her bloodied by the time she was going to be inaugurated,” he said in a conversation in Aspen, Colorado, in the summer of 2017, six months after he had left the CIA. But Putin was hedging his bets, Brennan surmised, by “also trying to promote the prospects of Mr. Trump.” Whether Russia could succeed in tampering with votes depended on the
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