At a press conference on the tarmac Thursday morning, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pressed a relentless attack against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, even when she was denying that she had attacked Trump.
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Clinton said the Iraq vote and the email server were both mistakes, but insisted that she had never sent or received material with a classified header on her private server.
Clinton called on Republicans to reject what she cast as Trump’s “scary” and “disqualifying” candidacy and offered a sharp response to his performance in Wednesday night’s NBC News Commander-in-Chief Forum, a pair of back-to-back interviews with both candidates on national security and veterans issues.
Trump on military generals: “I think under the leadership Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the generals have been reduced to rubble”.
When it was his turn, he told Lauer: “I heard Hillary Clinton say I was not against the war in Iraq”. She also fleshed out several national security priorities if she is elected, including trying to take out the leader of the Islamic State and vowing to defeat the extremist group without putting USA troops on the ground in Iraq or Syria.
Summing up the event, Maggie Haberman, the NYT’s presidential campaign correspondent, tweeted, “Clinton got tougher questions, but also got visibly irritated and defensive”.
TRUMP: Asked about the problem of sexual assault within the military, said, “We have to come down very, very hard on that”. And tonight, Lauer didn’t challenge Trump’s false suggestion that Clinton, who was Secretary of State at the time, “made a awful mistake on Libya” by making a decision different from what he would’ve done.
The televised “Commander-in-Chief” forum on Wednesday, attended by military veterans, was the first time Trump and Clinton had squared off on the same stage since accepting their parties’ White House nominations in July, although they did not appear at the same time.
Trump on Russian President Vladimir Putin: “I mean, the man has very strong control over a country”. “I could see myself working that”. Media critics lit up when Lauer let the oratorical escape artist get away with the assertion that he had not supported the Iraq war-an assertion about her opponent Clinton made earlier that evening. He replied, “Yeah, I guess so”.
Instead of calling into question well-documented reports that in 2002, the candidate said he supported an Iraq invasion, Lauer quickly moved on to the next question regarding Trump’s “temperament”.
Clinton has said in the past that the IS group has used footage of Trump in its recruitment efforts.
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Ahead of the forum, Trump rolled out a new plan to boost military spending by tens of billions of dollars, including major increases in the number of active troops, fighter planes, ships and submarines. He has no military experience and has repeatedly criticized the skill of the armed forces.
