Posted by
Gabrielle Cusumano on Friday, March 14, 2008 6:22:22 PM
In fact Greg Craig says she's lying about all her foreign policy experience!
Excerpted from The National Journal, March 14, 2008
&A: GREG CRAIG
Transcript: Greg Craig On Hillary Clinton's Foreign Policy Experience
National Journal's Linda Douglass sat down with Greg Craig for the March 14 edition of "National Journal On Air." This is a transcript of their conversation.
Q: I want to welcome Greg Craig. He is a Washington attorney and a senior adviser to the Barack Obama campaign. And he was, back in the Bill Clinton administration, the assistant to the president and special counsel and at that time a senior foreign policy adviser to President Clinton's administration. Welcome, Greg.
Craig: Nice to be here, Linda.
Q: So you have written a provocative memo for the Obama campaign making the argument that Hillary Clinton's experience as first lady, in terms of its relevance to being commander in chief and an expert on foreign policy, may have been exaggerated. How so?
Craig: Well, that was the point of my memo. If you're running for president on the basis of your claims of experience, when you then cite examples, you should be careful to be accurate. The evidence should be accurate. And my point is that Senator Clinton and her supporters have in serious ways overstated, if not grossly exaggerated, the nature of her experience. Take the Irish peace process -- which was a lengthy and arduous and difficult negotiation. She said, initially, that "I helped bring peace to Northern Ireland." Well, if you took the many, many heroes who were responsible for achieving that agreement -- I could name 20 people in Ireland. Primarily, the Irish were responsible for doing this, and the Americans were strong supporters.
But it's a little bit presumptuous for the first lady, who would meet people and support people to take credit away from the Irish themselves who did it. Terry McAuliffe said, "We would not have peace today had it not been for Hillary's hard work in Northern Ireland." That's just not true. This morning, Senator Clinton said on NPR that the role that she played in the Irish peace process was "instrumental." Well, that's not accurate. That's an overstatement. And anybody who is really knowledgeable about what went on, including George Mitchell, who wrote a book about it -- he wrote a book about the peace process, and he never mentioned any role whatsoever that Senator Clinton, or the first lady at the time, played.
Q: Well, you know, of course, that the Clinton campaign immediately put out a memo quoting George Mitchell saying that she did play a positive role over the decade in bringing peace to Northern Ireland.
Craig: Well, playing a positive role is a little bit different than claiming that you were instrumental. She wasn't involved in the tough negotiations. She played no role in resolving the tough issues. She met on one occasion in the White House with Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, and that was nice. It was a photo opportunity. She traveled to Ireland with her husband and met with the women, and the women, of course, were heroic in their work for peace. But she can't take credit for bringing the women together. They were the courageous ones that did it themselves. What she said was, "It's a good thing you're doing it. We're all for you. I hope you're successful." That's not instrumental. That's not bringing peace to Ireland.
Q: You also say that the claim that she has passed the commander in chief test, then, is not supported by this record.
Craig: No, I think, look -- I think she would be a capable commander in chief. I think Barack Obama, who is my candidate, would also be a capable commander in chief. I'm not denigrating that. What I'm saying is that when you talk about evidence of experience, you should be accurate as to what your role really was. Here's another example -- she claims that she negotiated the opening of the borders in the former Republic of Macedonia, and she arrived the day after that had been achieved. She traveled there, but she had nothing to do with the negotiations. And Ambassador [Robert] Gelbard, who was very much involved, said that she really didn't play any role in that at all and that it's a mistake and not accurate for her to take credit for it.
Q: And again, of course, you know that the Clinton campaign has said that former senior foreign policy adviser to the Clinton administration, Richard Holbrooke, said she did play a role.
Craig: She claims that she negotiated the opening of the borders -- that's not accurate, and Ambassador Holbrooke would be the first to agree that that's not accurate.
Q: So let's just put this on a scale of one to 10 here. Are we talking exaggeration, or are we talking about something more serious, such as not being truthful?
Craig: Well, I think it's exaggeration. It's inflated résumé. It's in that category. I think she is misleading the American public on the nature of her experience.
Q: But was that experience, do you think, that is -- having a lot of influence with advisers, giving private advice to her husband -- was that experience that has helped prepare her to be commander in chief?
Craig: Oh, I don't doubt that. The point that I am making is that her claims of the nature of that experience are overstated. The fact is she did not sit in on national security meetings. She did not have a security clearance. She did not attend meetings in the situation room. She conducted no negotiations. She did not manage any part of the national security bureaucracy. She did not have her own national security staff. That's the fact. Now the experience that she did have -- watching and sometimes sitting in the room where discussions were going on and also meeting heads of state and foreign ministers -- that is good experience, and it's invaluable to understanding how the world works when it comes to international organizations as well as international negotiations...
For more of this excerpted transcript go to National Journal at: