Republican candidates blasted Hillary Clinton for her record as secretary of state and her use of a private email server during CNN’s presidential debate Wednesday evening.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie opened the debate by encouraging his fellow presidential contenders to focus their aggression on Clinton instead of one another.
“We shouldn’t be fighting with each other,” Christie said, who is number twelve in the Washington Examiner’s presidential power rankings. “She’s the real opponent.”
Carly Fiorina, who has been a leading critic of Clinton in the early months of the campaign, recycled a barb she has used against the Democratic front-runner in the past to blast one of Clinton’s top feats as secretary.
“Like Mrs. Clinton, I too have traveled hundreds of thousands of miles around the globe,” Fiorina said. “But unlike Mrs. Clinton, I know that flying is an activity, it is not an accomplishment.”
The former Hewlett-Packard CEO said Clinton will have to contend with her State Department activities.
“Mrs. Clinton is going to have to defend her track record, her track record of lying about Benghazi, of lying about her emails, of lying about her servers,” Fiorina said. “She does not have a track record of accomplishment.”
Ohio Gov. John Kasich declined to attack Clinton despite an invitation to do so by conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, who was a moderator at the debate.
‘We’ll get to the point where we’ll talk about Hillary Clinton, or whoever the nominee is,” Kasich said. “But right now, I want to give people a sense of hope.”
Kasich touted his popularity in Ohio, a key swing state in national elections.
“Don’t worry about me and Hillary, that’ll all work out,” he said. “I’m from Ohio. She will not beat me there, I can promise you that.”
But Christie, another sitting governor, vowed to go after Clinton on the email controversy that has hampered her campaign.
“The question is, who’s going to prosecute Hillary Clinton? The Obama White House seems to have no interest, the Justice Department seems to have no interest. I think it’s time to put a former federal prosecutor on the same stage as Hillary Clinton, and I will prosecute her during those debates on that stage for the record that we’re talking about here,” he said.
“The fact that she had a private email server in her basement using national security secrets running through it, could have been hacked by the Russians, the Chinese, or two 18-year-olds on the tube wanting to have some fun,” Christie noted. “No one’s answering that question from the Hillary Clinton camp, because she knows she’s wrong and she cannot look in the mirror at herself and she cannot tell the American people the truth.”
