Clearly distancing herself from Barack Obama as regards exchanging Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five high-level Taliban terrorists, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is making it known she “was personally and intensely involved in the debate over swapping five Taliban commanders for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in 2011 and 2012. But she had severe reservations about the potential deal, and was demanding stricter conditions for the release of the prisoners than what President Obama settled for last week”.
It’s also now being reported that “Clinton had a framework deal drawn up that was much tougher on the Taliban than what ultimately got done two years later”.
Given what seems to be an increasingly negative view of the deal that was done and the very real possibility of a run for the presidency in 2016 by Hillary, it’s likely Team Hillary has decided to make sure her fingerprints are nowhere near the exchange.
Three former administration officials who were involved in the process told The Daily Beast that Clinton was worried about the ability to enforce the deal and disinclined to trust the Taliban or the Haqqani network in Pakistan, which held Bergdahl until this weekend. Clinton was so concerned, the former officials added, that she may not have even signed off if the negotiations had succeeded.
“She was heavily involved from the beginning, she was very skeptical of the arrangement, she was very wary of it,” one former administration official said. “If we had come to some agreement she perhaps would have backed it, but we never got to that point.”
Whatever the future holds, someone certainly is going to great lengths to put great distance between Hillary and the current administration on this one, though Hillary does seem content to let others do the heavy lifting for her, while being vague in her own comments.
On Tuesday, Clinton gave a vague and non-committal statement on the prisoner swap, declining to say whether she was for it or against it or whether she still fears the released prisoners pose a threat to America.