Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus blasted Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy as a “list of things not to do” on Thursday ahead of the former secretary of state’s national security speech, during which she is expected to make an appeal to disaffected Republicans who oppose Donald Trump.
“There isn’t a more flawed messenger on national security issues than Hillary Clinton, who as Obama’s secretary of state helped turn Libya into a jihadist playground, spearheaded the dangerous nuclear deal with Iran, and secretly called for bringing terrorists from Guantanamo onto U.S. soil,” Priebus said in a statement released hours before Clinton’s speech.
He continued, “While Clinton was jeopardizing our national security by exposing classified information on her secret email server, her State Department left high-risk diplomatic outposts around the globe vulnerable to attack.”
Priebus described Clinton’s national security record as something that “reads more like a list of things not to do rather than a model of how to keep America safe and secure.”
Clinton is set to deliver her widely-anticipated speech at 2:30 p.m. ET in San Diego, Calif., where she has been campaigning hard ahead of the state’s June 7 primary.
“You will hear in her speech a confidence in America and our capacity to overcome the challenges we face while staying true to our values — a strong contrast to Donald Trump’s incessant trash-talking of America,” her senior policy adviser Jake Sullivan said in a preview of her address.
Trump’s combative nature and previous foreign policy proposals continue to worry Republicans in both the intelligence and national security communities, who fear he would take a reckless approach to foreign affairs.
“He swings from isolationism to military adventurism within the space of one sentence,” more than 100 GOP national security leaders said of Trump earlier this year in an open letter to voters.
Trump has sought to assuage such concerns since becoming the presumptive Republican nominee by meeting with a handful of foreign policy veterans, including former Secretaries of State James Baker and Henry Kissinger.
