Mitt Romney slammed Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, saying American interests abroad deteriorated during her time in office.
He also defended a House committee’s controversial investigation into the 2012 Benghazi attack.
“Her mistaken perspective on foreign policy has led to the fact that, frankly, there’s no place in the world that I can think of where American interests have been bettered by virtue of Hillary Clinton having served as secretary of state,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview that aired Sunday on “State of the Union.” “That’s quite an indictment, whether it’s Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Libya, Israel, the South China Sea.”
Clinton also greatly misjudged Putin’s intentions with America, said Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee.
“Hillary Clinton was completely misguided and uninformed with regards to the intention of Putin, (current Prime Minister Dmitry) Medvedev and Russia. And her great mistake was characterized by her pressing that reset button with a great big smile … that somehow she thought Russia was going to be our friend and ally,” he said.
Romney famously told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in March 2012 that Russia was “without question our number one geopolitical foe,” at the time earning snickers from the political world for seemingly being out of touch with the global threats facing America.
“The 1980s, they’re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years,” Obama told Romney during one of their presidential debates.
Romney also told Tapper that Clinton’s “misjudgment” continued by not providing security for Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador who was killed in the Benghazi attack, and in how she handled emails while at the State Department.
“There are two parts of the Benghazi hearing and I think she’s being trying to conflate the two. One, of course, is what her role was in the terrible misjudgment in not providing security in Benghazi to protect our ambassador. And I think the committee wants to make sure that those mistakes are not made again,” he said.
“And then something that came from the Benghazi hearings but is not really directly related to Benghazi itself, and that is the fact that, unlike any other former secretary of state, she had her own email server. And she was conducting business on the email server and it’s very possible that classified information was breached as a result of her misjudgment,” he added.