Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign claims Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has distorted her record on foreign policy in order to win over Republican primary voters.
Rubio called Clinton “incompetent” and “a liar” during a speech in New Hampshire on Monday. Rubio highlighted Clinton’s past statements claiming that a video sparked the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, as indicative of a time when “she lied to our faces.”
Rubio promised he would remind Clinton of her misdeeds if he becomes the presidential nominee of the Republican Party in 2016.
But the Clinton campaign responded swiftly, and seemed to argue that Clinton favored a more hawkish approach to foreign affairs than Rubio, in some respects.
“Marco Rubio’s attempts to curry favor among the Republican base by blasting Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration on foreign policy are ironic considering he backed many of the very policies he now points to as problematic,” said Christina Reynolds, Clinton campaign deputy communications director, said in a statement.
“Rubio supported the U.S. intervention in Libya, saying the administration ‘did the right things.’ At various points, Rubio supported arming the moderate opposition in Syria, a position Hillary Clinton advocated. And in fact, when President Obama sought congressional authorization to strike Syria for using chemical weapons on their own people, which Hillary Clinton supported, it was Marco Rubio who voted against it.”
The Clinton campaign also published a blog post saying that Rubio had “attempted to airbrush his record on Libya.”
The Rubio campaign responded in a statement saying that it was Clinton, in fact, who had distorted Rubio’s record.
“The Clinton campaign’s attacks against Marco are a false rewriting of history—and they know it,” said Rubio spokesman Alex Conant in a statement. “After four years as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton cannot name a single notable achievement beyond traveling the globe. … Her record as Secretary of State is one of disengagement and failure. She now tries to claim prescience regarding Syria yet when she had an opportunity to speak clearly and convince the President to change U.S. policy, she either stayed silent or he didn’t take her counsel seriously.”
The war of words between the Clinton and Rubio campaigns comes amid new reports that the two sides worked much more closely in recent years past when Clinton sought to make Mari Carmen Aponte the ambassador to El Salvador.
