Hillary Clinton said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has not contacted her, even though it is standard practice for newly appointed Cabinet members to reach out to those who previously held their positions and condemned his “obsession” with downsizing the State Department budget.
“I don’t know who [Tillerson] has reached out to. He certainly hasn’t reached out to me,” Clinton told PBS NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff in an interview that was part of her book tour for the newly released campaign memoir What Happened.
Tillerson has been “largely invisible excepting for his obsession with cutting the budget at the State Department,” Clinton added.
Tillerson submitted a plan Thursday to downsize the State Department and would save $10 billion the next five years.
Turning to the Trump Cabinet at large, Clinton said that Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis appears to have filled not only his own Cabinet position, but also Tillerson’s, because there’s a “big void to fill there.”
Clinton also took shots at Tillerson during an interview on Thursday.
“We have decimated our State Department,” Clinton told Rachel Maddow of MSNBC. “Foreign service officers with decades of experience have either been ignored or in some cases pushed so hard that they have resigned.”
“There’s no real plan,” she added. “What I hear from inside of the department, because I still have a lot of communication coming to me, is that there’s a very small group of people around Tillerson, none of them experienced diplomats that he has brought in to be his palace guards, so to speak.”
