The primary campaign is barely underway, but that hasn’t stopped presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton from exchanging blows as if it’s already 2016.
One of Clinton’s top campaign officials said Tuesday that Bush’s brother, George W. Bush, is largely to blame for the problems in Iraq. The comments came ahead of a speech tonight where the former Florida governor is expected to slam Clinton on foreign policy.
Bush is scheduled to deliver what his campaign is billing as a major foreign policy speech Tuesday night at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California. He’ll use the opportunity to knock the former secretary of state, especially on Iraq and the rise of the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS.
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“Who can seriously argue that America and our friends are safer today than in 2009, when the President and Secretary Clinton — the storied ‘team of rivals’ took office?” Bush will say, according to excerpts released by his campaign. “In all her record-setting travels, she stopped by Iraq exactly once.”
On a conference call with reporters Tuesday afternoon ahead of the speech, Clinton policy adviser Jake Sullivan, who was also a senior State Department official under Clinton, said Bush was trying to “rewrite history.”
“This is a pretty bold attempt to rewrite history and reassign responsibility,” said Sullivan. “We’ve seen similar things from other Republican candidates — they cannot be allowed to escape responsibility for the real mistake here. They might hope we all forget but the American people remember.”
Sullivan went on to say that ISIS “emerged in no small part as a result of President Bush’s failed strategy. And it gained strength by signing up former Sunni military officers. Officers from the very army that the Bush Administration disbanded.”
The foreign policy spat comes a day after Clinton and Bush camps exchanged fire on Twitter over the college affordability plan she rolled out Monday in New Hampshire.
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