Mitt Romney may not be a candidate for president in 2016, but on Sunday he offered up plenty of ways to attack Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton should she run.
“The playbook, I believe, is to look at her record,” Romney said on NBC’s Meet The Press. “Consider what’s happened around the world when she was secretary of state.”
Romney called her tenure at the State Department a “monumental bust” and blamed her for allowing threats from Russia, Syria, and Iraq to grow under her watch.
“This administration, from Secretary Clinton to President Obama, has repeatedly underestimated the threats that are faced by America,” he said.
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He accused her more recently of minimizing the threat five Taliban commanders released in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl posed to American forces and interests in Afghanistan.
“I think her clueless comments about the Bergdahl exchange, as well as her record as the secretary of state, are really going to be the foundation of how a Republican candidate is able to take back the White House,” Romney said. He had already attacked her comments in a separate interview with Fox News just days earlier. Clinton said in an interview with NBC last week that the Taliban prisoners were “not a threat to the United States,” but instead were “a threat to the safety and security of Afghanistan and Pakistan” that those countries would have to decide how to handle. Romney, who held a retreat in Utah this week with a number of top Republican donors, has kept a high profile in 2014, endorsing a number of candidates and offering increasingly pointed critiques of Obama’s second term and Clinton’s potential candidacy. Given the lack of an obvious frontrunner for the Republican nomination, some of his old financial backers have suggested he run again himself. Romney, for his part, has steadfastly denied any interest. “I’m not running for president,” he told NBC News on Sunday. “I brought a number of the 2016 contenders here to meet with my fundraisers. If I had been running, I wouldn’t be doing that.”
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