Michele Bachmann: Hillary Clinton "not commander in chief material"
Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., doesn't think Hillary Clinton should be president.
Triumphantly pointing to her spot on the House Intelligence Committee as an apparent credential to make such an assessment, the outgoing congresswoman on Friday at the Faith and Freedom Coalition's annual cattle call unsheathed a diatribe against Clinton's record as the former secretary of state.
Americans, Bachmann told the receptive crowd at Washington, D.C.'s Omni Shoreham hotel, are living in "profoundly dangerous times, unlike anything any of us have seen in our lifetimes." But she said a recent prisoner swap to exchange five Taliban detainees for U.S. Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl suggests an unacceptably flimsy foreign policy under the current administration.
"We have a president and a former secretary of state who think that releasing five of the Taliban's top operational leaders poses virtually no national security risk to the people of the United States of America," she said. "I beg to differ with that assessment."
Clinton, who stepped down from her role as secretary in 2013, wasn't privy to the ultimate decision last month to release the prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. Reports indicate that she actually opposed such an exchange when the idea first surfaced in 2011.
Still, Bachmann continued, shifting her critique to the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Clinton "reinforces daily to the American people that she is not commander in chief material." She"fails to inspire confidence," Bachmann said, "and practically anything that she has touched in her record as secretary of state - including her utter abject failure in Benghazi - should disqualify her from ever being considered for the presidency."
Last year Clinton testified before Congress about claims that the State Department delayed or altogether ignored requests for heightened security at the Libyan compound where four American diplomats lost their lives. During her testimony she conceded "deficiencies and inadequacies" in the approval process but defended her own actions and those of her staff toward the tragedy.
But throughout her defense, Bachmann charged in her signature stump-style delivery, Clinton hasn't managed to "keep her story straight - and even though the media obsesses on her, it's time for a real interview. And that interview will come with accountability from the American people."
For her part, during Bachmann's own White House run in 2012, only 5 percent of Republican Iowa caucus-goers supported her bid to be commander in chief. She was forced to bow out of the race following a disappointing sixth-place showing in the first-in-the-nation state.
