Spencer Platt/Getty Images(NEW YORK) — Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were grilled Wednesday night by veterans in a wide-ranging forum that touched on Clinton’s email scandal and the fitness of both to be commander-in-chief.
During the forum — where the candidates appeared separately — Trump suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been a better leader than President Obama.
“The man has very strong control over a country,” he said. “Now It’s a very different system and I don’t happen to like the system, but certainly in that system, he’s been a leader. Far more than our president has been a leader.”
Trump did very little to tamper controversial talk about how he has been friendly with Russia throughout his campaign.
“I think I would have a very, very good relationship with Putin. I think i would have a very, very good relationship with Russia,” Trump said.
During the forum, Clinton was grilled about her use of a personal email server and handling of classified information — issues that have plagued her on the campaign trail.
“It was a mistake to have a personal account, I would certainly not do it again, I make no excuses for it,” she said, repeating her assertion that the classified emails she received on the private email were not properly marked as classified.
“I communicated about classified material on a wholly separate system,” she said, in response to a question from a member of the audience that was a Republican former member of the Air Force and the Navy. “I took it very seriously. When I traveled, I went into one of those little tents that I’m sure you’ve seen around the world, because we didn’t want there to be any potential for someone to have embedded a camera to try to see whatever it is that I was seeing that was designated, marked, and headed as classified. So I did exactly what I should have done and I take it very seriously. Always have, always will.”
Clinton also declared that she would never send additional ground troops to defeat ISIS.
“They not going to get ground troops. We are not putting ground troops into Iraq ever again and we are not putting ground troops into Syria. We’re going to defeat ISIS without committing American ground troops,” she said.
She did, however, say that “we’ve got to do it with much more support for the Arabs and the Kurds who will fight on the ground against ISIS,” and plans on including those troops as part of a larger global operation.
When it was his turn, Trump talked about the War in Iraq and the rise of ISIS, saying that he would have handled the situation differently.
“It used to be, ‘To the victor belongs the spoils.’ Now, there was no victor there, believe me. But I always said, take the oil,” he said.
When asked if anything that he learned in his recent intelligence briefings shocked or alarmed him, Trump said “yes.”
“There was one thing that shocked me,” he said.
“I’m pretty good with the body language; they were not happy. Our leaders did not follow what they were recommending,” Trump said in relation to the intelligence agents.
The town hall was hosted by MSNBC/NBC on the Intrepid aircraft carrier and the audience was made up largely of veterans.
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