Hillary Clinton Rips Donald Trump for Lauding Vladimir Putin
By AMY CHOZICK and JONATHAN MARTIN SEPT. 8, 2016
nytimes.com
WHITE PLAINS — Hillary Clinton excoriated Donald J. Trump on Thursday for asserting that the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, was a better leader than President Obama, saying Mr. Trump’s praise for the authoritarian leader of an adversarial power “is not just unpatriotic and insulting to the people of our country, as well as to our commander in chief, it is scary.”
Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate, seized on Mr. Trump’s assertion in a televised forum Wednesday that Mr. Putin’s incursions into neighboring countries, crackdown on Russia’s independent press and support for America’s enemies were no less troublesome than Mr. Obama’s transgressions. She said it showed that if elected, her Republican rival would be little more than a tool of Mr. Putin.
“It suggests he will let Putin do whatever Putin wants to do, and then make excuses for him,” Mrs. Clinton told reporters at a brief news conference before boarding her campaign plane, ratcheting up her oratory as polls indicate the race has tightened — and as Mr. Trump continues to say things rarely heard before from a major party presidential nominee.
In the Wednesday night forum on NBC and MSNBC, which was devoted to national security issues, Mr. Trump twice denigrated America’s generals, suggested he would fire the country’s current military leadership and claimed, without offering evidence, that the intelligence officials who recently gave him a classified briefing about threats to the United States were not pleased with Mr. Obama.
Mrs. Clinton appeared incredulous at times as she remarked upon Mr. Trump’s statements, particularly about Mr. Putin.
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