Florida Sen. Marco Rubio says his opponent Donald Trump is wrong to suggest President George W. Bush bears responsibility for the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, arguing that the majority of the failures that led to the deadly attacks should be attributed to President Bill Clinton's administration instead.
"It's just not true, it's wrong. What he said is just not true," Rubio told NewsMaxTV The Hard Line with Ed Berliner on Wednesday about Trump.
"The truth is that President George W. Bush inherited all sorts of things from the Clinton administration, including intelligence agencies and others who weren't doing a very good job that were not sharing information across agencies. Including a government that under President Clinton had not taken seriously al-Qaeda and the threat that they posed," Rubio continued, citing the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, the first World Trade Center bombing, and other terrorist attacks.
For the past week, Trump has discussed the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, specifically noting Bush was president during the attacks and had responsibility for them. Trump went as far saying the Bush administration was warned by the CIA director the attack was coming and did nothing.
Rubio noted Bush had been in office for less than a year when the attacks happened.
"As a result, President Bush was only in office nine months when this happened, but that plot to conduct 9/11 and the steps that it took to bring it about — those began well before he was even sworn into office," Rubio said. "It happened under the watch of President Clinton, in fact, the 9/11 Commission says that. If you look, all of their recommendations, many of them were about reversing mistakes that were made during the Clinton presidency."
"He doesn't have a fundamental understanding of what caused 9/11," Rubio said of Trump.