The forum format didn’t allow candidates to spar face to face, but Clinton charged that Trump supports an agenda to privatize VA while Trump refuted the accusation.
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Although she tried to move on from the scandal over using her own “homebrew” email server and account at the State Department, she has been hit by revelation after revelation about it and its contents.
Though Trump and Clinton did not appear onstage together at the USS Intrepid museum in NY, the NBC News forum was a debate in all but name and came fewer than three weeks before the candidates’ first debate.
Earlier, FBI Director James Comey told his colleagues that the decision to not recommend charges against Clinton was not a close call.
Before Trump spoke, Clinton too was asked about her security smarts, but also faced questions on the sprawling email scandal that continues to overshadow her White House run. “I communicated about classified information on a wholly separate system”.
This included Trump’s quote on nuclear weapons, in which he declared “the power, the devastation is very important to me”. “And does that mean the only way to fix it is take women out of the military?”
Clinton defended her support for US military intervention in Libya, despite the chaos that has consumed that country since then. “He supported it. He told Howard Stern he supported it”.
Lauer asked Trump whether he knows more about ISIS than President Barack Obama’s generals, a statement he has previously made.
But Graham, a leading foreign policy hawk on Capitol Hill, also said he preferred Clinton’s national security plan over Trump’s because he liked the idea of “a safe haven inside of Syria”.
Trump has made no secret of his admiration for Putin, who previous year praised the USA businessman as “very outstanding”. Putin has returned in kind, calling Trump “a colourful and talented man.”
The GOP nominee again defended Russian President Vladimir Putin. Of those advising him, he said: “We have admirals, we have generals, we have colonels, we have a lot of people I respect”. He also said that, if elected, he would give military leaders 30 days to formulate a multi-pronged plan to defeat Islamic State.
Seriously?! Donald Trump was asked about how he would deal with Vladimir Putin at the NBC News Forum on September 7, and while he had nothing but great things to say about the Russian President, he slammed President Obama!
During Wednesday’s event, Trump remained persistently vague about his plans for defeating ISIS, insisting that he privately has a blueprint for taking on the terror group but wanted to remain “unpredictable”.
“I never said take the VA private”. So I did exactly what I should have done and I take it very seriously.
In a breach of protocol, Mr Trump attempted to use the fact he had received two confidential intelligence briefings as the Republican nominee to suggest he had gleaned from them that President Obama and Ms Clinton, when she was Secretary of State, had routinely ignored the advice the intelligence experts had been giving them.
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A sizeable number of these voters say they would not be confident in Clinton or Trump’s ability to be an effective commander-in-chief of the nation’s military, though a slight majority would be confident in Trump (53 per cent), the NBC News|SurveyMonkey Weekly Election Tracking Poll finds. “They view him as a danger and a risk”.
