Hillary Clinton said Tuesday night that she was forced to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trade deal President Obama asked Congress to approve, because the final terms of the deal were so bad that she had no choice but to reject it even though she had earlier expressed qualified support.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked her about her earlier support during the Democratic presidential debate Tuesday. Clinton, as Obama’s secretary of state, was involved in the negotiations for the deal.
“I did say when I was secretary of state that I hoped the trade deal would be ‘the gold standard,’ ” Clinton conceded. But that was before the deal was actually concluded, she noted.
The negotiations were officially finished last week. Last Wednesday, Clinton announced her opposition. She told Cooper that she had hoped she could support it, but after reading the the text, “I concluded that I could not.”
The deal, which would lower tariffs and other trade barriers among the U.S. and 11 other Pacific Rim nations, had long been a contentious issue between Clinton and organized labor, which loathes free-trade policies. Labor leaders had pressured Clinton for months to come out against the trade deal.
