Marco Rubio: Donald Trump wrong to blame George Bush for 9/11

Donald Trump's assertions about the September 11, 2001 attacks were "just not true," Sen. Marco Rubio, one of Trump's 2016 opponents, told the conservative news outlet Newsmax.

Trump, Bush spar over 9/11 comments

Trump in the past week has questioned former President George W. Bush's competency since the terrorist attacks happened on his watch. While insisting he wasn't trying to "blame" Mr. Bush or anyone else, Trump said, "I think I'm much more competent than all of them. When you talk about George Bush, I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time." And he suggested that his immigration policies would have prevented the 9/11 attacks, saying on Fox News Sunday last weekend, "I doubt those people would have been in the country."

Rubio, however, said that Mr. Bush "inherited all sorts of things from the Clinton administration, including intelligence agencies and others who weren't doing a very good job that were... not sharing information across agencies."

President Bill Clinton's administration, Rubio charged, "had not taken seriously al Qaeda and the threat that they posed," even though the plot to carry out the 9/11 attacks began "well before" Mr. Bush was in office.

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