A former staffer from Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign decided to vent his grievances with President Obama in a 2012 email to Clinton.
Mark Penn, pollster for both Clintons, sent the then-secretary of state a message calling recent remarks by Obama “the stupidest thing ever said by a president in foreign policy,” according to an email included in the State Department’s Dec. 31 email release.
The polling expert adds that Clinton may have to resign from her job because of Obama’s comments.
“To explicitly say that he is laying low on nuclear defense policies because of his election right now and tell your opponent that is to politicize all foreign policy, evidence weakness that can be exploited by others, and undermine the administration’s credibility,” he said.
“This is one I’m glad I don’t have to figure out how to retract but you will surely be asked if your decisions and positions are part of the election campaign and bat that down definitively. Or even consider resigning if that’s the case — American foreign and strategic nuclear policy can’t be one way before an election and another after it — and certainly you can’t tell your opponents that or from al qaeda one down they will figure out how to use that,” Penn wrote.
But Clinton’s response, or lack thereof, was just an unexpected as Penn’s comments.
Instead of replying to Penn, Clinton forwarded the message to her deputy chief of staff Jacob Sullivan, asking him what Penn’s lengthy email was regarding.
“There was an open-mike situation in Seoul where POTUS was caught saying to M that he was hemmed in on missile defense in an election year … It is not good — at all — but I think Mark may be pushing it a bit far,” replied Sullivan.
Clinton’s response to Sullivan has yet to be discovered in the 5,500 pages of emails.
