Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is “unelectable” in part because he presented former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with a public service award one year after the Benghazi terrorist attacks, one conservative group is charging.
ForAmerica released a video Thursday targeting a broad network of conservative activists, many in early primary states, showing Bush and Clinton praising one another.
Bush presented Clinton with the award on Sept. 10, 2013 at the National Constitution Center’s Liberty Medal Awards ceremony. The Benghazi terrorist attacks, in which four Americans were killed, occurred on Sept. 11, 2012. The attacks happened on Clinton’s watch at the State Department, with lingering questions about the matter sure to be part of her likely 2016 presidential campaign.
“I want to say thank you to both Secretary Clinton and to President Clinton, thank you for your service to our country,” Jeb Bush says in the video. “We are united by our love of country and public service.”
Hillary Clinton says, “I want to say a special thank you to Governor Bush … Now this is not the first time a Clinton and a Bush have shared this stage.”
The presentation also came less than nine months after Clinton told a Senate panel questioning hear about the motivation behind the Benghazi attacks, “What difference at this point does it make?”
The video release follows Bush’s foreign policy speech in Chicago Wednesday in which he criticized the Obama administration’s foreign policy, asserted that he is his own man and not tied to the policies of his brother or father, but defended the National Security Agency surveillance program under President Barack Obama.
“It’s bad enough that Hillary Clinton will likely use footage from this event against any Republican nominee, but if Jeb Bush is her opponent she will make him look ridiculous,” ForAmerica Chairman Brent Bozell said in a statement.
“Anytime Jeb calls Hillary 'Obama 2.0,' any criticism he makes of her awful record as secretary of state, any time he shows how much of an extremist she is on the issues, will be completely dismissed when she reminds everyone that he gave her an award for public service,” Bozell said. “As it stands, Jeb has absolutely no credibility to criticize her because he has already anointed her as a great public servant; and he inexplicably did so almost a year to the day of the Benghazi massacre. He will lose, and the public will have to suffer at least another four years of Obama’s policies – and anything worse she has in store for America.”
