Sen. Marco Rubio appeared on Newsmax TV yesterday, where he was asked about Donald Trump’s rather obvious assertion that the 9/11 attack happened on George W. Bush’s “watch.”
Newsmax host Ed Berliner asked the GOP presidential hopeful to comment on whether it was “reprehensible for Donald Trump to dredge up 9/11 and dredge up that day and try to use it for political gain.” Fully expecting Rubio to agree that it was indeed reprehensible to use 9/11 for the purpose of launching a political attack, Berliner was probably surprised when Rubio responded by doing exactly that … but shifting the blame onto President Bill Clinton.
Trump’s attack on Bush was “wrong,” Rubio said, because “the truth is that George W. Bush inherited all sorts of things from the Clinton administration, including intelligence agencies and others who were not doing a very good job and were siloing off and not sharing information across agencies, including a government under President Clinton that had not taken seriously al Qaeda and the threat that they posed, even after the USS Cole, even after the first Trade Center bombings, and all of the other challenges that we faced around world.”
“President Bush was only in office nine months when this happened,” Rubio continued, omitting the fact that the Bush administration ignored al Qaeda threats before the 9/11 attacks, “but that plot to conduct 9/11 and the steps that it took to bring it about, those began well before he was even sworn into office. It happened under the watch of President Clinton”:
