Rice to Trump: Obama Administration Left the National Strategic Stockpile ‘Fully Stocked’

Former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice said during an interview on CNN on Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s was incorrect when he said the Obama administration left “left the national strategic stockpile fully stocked.”

Host Anderson Cooper said, “One of the reasons the president says he takes no responsibility is because the actions of your previous boss President Obama, here is what he told our Jim Acosta earlier this month.”

In a clip, Acosta asked, “If you were preparing for a pandemic if this government were preparing for a pandemic, why is it that we don’t have enough masks and medical equipment?”

Trump said, “The previous administration gave us little ammunition for the military and very little self space. Let me just tell you. You know. You know the answer. That the previous administration — the shelves were empty. What you should do is speak to the people from the previous administration and ask that question.”

Cooper said, “You left a 69-page playbook for dummies. How do you respond to that?”

Rice said, “This would be comical if it were not too serious and deadly. We have the president of the United States who said in a straight face after being in office three years that he takes responsibility for nothing. Imagine that. We never heard that ever out of the mouth of the president of the United States.”

She continued, “The fact of the matter is when the Obama administration left office, we left the national strategic stockpile fully stocked, adequately prepared, as one would expect it to be. That has been validated by independent journalists who had the opportunity to visit the stockpile in late 2016. But more than the stockpile, we left this incoming administration with all the tools that we had created for ourselves and that they needed to confront such a pandemic. We understood that a pandemic was not only predicted but was actually inevitable. The only question was when. In 2014 President Obama warned the nation that this could happen. I established an office in the National Security Council purely for the purpose of tracking pandemics and outbreaks and biological threats. That office was disbanded by 2018 by the Trump administration.”

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