Hillary Clinton is seeking to refine remarks she made about her and former President Bill Clinton being broke when they left the White House while on a high-profile media tour for a new book.
In an interview on the day her book Hard Choices was being released, Hillary Clinton told ABC’s Good Morning America that she and her husband left the White House roughly $12 million in debt at the end of his second term in early 2001 and were “dead broke”. But she also said “we’ve continued to be blessed in the last 14 years.”
Hillary Clinton said that she wants “to use the talent and resources that I have to make sure” others have the same opportunities.
It was the second time in as many days that Hillary Clinton talked of her interest in possibly running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2016.
In an interview with ABC News that aired Monday, she said that at the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency her family “came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt. We had no money when we got there, and we struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea’s education. You know, it was not easy”.
Republicans quickly seized on the comment, two years after their presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, was dogged by accusations of being out of touch because of his wealth. Republican officials pointed out that Hillary Clinton received an $8 million book advance for her 2003 memoir and said it showed she would have trouble relating to average Americans.
Hillary Clinton said that Republican inquiries into her handling of the deadly 2012 attack on the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, gave her more of an incentive to run. While she said she’s still undecided about her political future, Hillary Clinton cited the Benghazi probe as an example of a dysfunctional Congress.
On Benghazi, Hillary Clinton said Tuesday she believed “there were some systemic problems within the State Department. And if we had known that earlier, perhaps we could have done some changes”.
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