Hillary Clinton said Thursday that the Islamic State wants Donald Trump to win the presidency because he would be a weaker leader, and she also reiterated her pledge to keep ground troops out of the Middle East during her first press conference in 2016.
Clinton cited an article by a national security expert that argued the Islamic State “supports Donald Trump” and questioned the Republican nominee’s seemingly favorable comments on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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“I think putting a big contingent of American ground troops on the ground in Iraq and Syria would not be in the best interest of the fight against ISIS,” Clinton said after reporters suggested her unequivocal pledge to keep troops out of the region could box in her strategy.
“I think it would fulfill one of their dearest wishes, which is to drag the United States back into a ground war in that region,” she added.
Clinton’s impromptu press conference came on the heels of a televised town hall Wednesday evening, during which Clinton and Trump both struggled to address about their foreign policy weaknesses.
“Last night was yet another test and Donald Trump failed again,” Clinton said.
The former secretary of state faced tough questions about her treatment of classified information in a forum hosted by NBC News on Wednesday. Veterans in the audience suggested they would have been jailed had they emailed top secret material on their personal accounts.
But Clinton continued to defend her conduct at the State Department, arguing the classified emails cited by the FBI in a scathing report made public last week did not bear headers denoting them as classified. The emails did contain portion markings, or smaller markings indicating that parts of a document are classified while other parts are unclassified.
The Democratic nominee told FBI investigators that she thought the classified “C” portion markings had been placed in her emails to organize paragraphs alphabetically.
During NBC’s “Commander in Chief” forum, Clinton took questions about her push to involve the U.S. in Libya’s civil war while she served as secretary of state. Clinton took fire on social media following the forum for arguing the conflict did not claim “a single American” despite the four that died in a Benghazi terror attack.
Clinton has weathered fierce criticism for her failure to convene a press conference during the first nine months of this year. She attempted to end a Republican-led tally of the days since her last news conference earlier this week when she spoke with reporters aboard her campaign jet.
However, the closely-controlled interaction with the media sparked a debate about whether the event constituted a press conference. The Republican National Committee continued their daily reminder of the time since Clinton’s last conference, reaching 278 days before the Democratic nominee addressed reporters on the tarmac Thursday.
Although Clinton argued Thursday that the Islamic State wants a Trump victory, she hammered Trump’s suggestion earlier this summer that the Obama administration founded the terrorist group by destabalizing the Middle East.
Clinton previewed her latest attack on her opponent to an Israeli news network in an interview set to air Thursday in which she claimed the Islamic State is “rooting for Donald Trump’s victory.”
“They are saying ‘oh, please Allah, make Trump president of America,'” Clinton said of Islamic State terrorists.
