Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Thursday that the Trump administration isn’t doing enough to monitor and thwart terrorists who still pose a threat to the U.S., 25 years after the 9/11 attacks.
“I worry a lot that we’ve let down our guard on counterterrorism, and I don’t say this to scare anybody or to exaggerate, but I think we are not paying enough attention to resurgent terrorist actions,” Clinton said in an interview with NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell at the VOICES 25th Anniversary Symposium, an event reflecting on the attacks.
Clinton, who was a U.S. senator from New York on 9/11, said that there have been many “close calls” with terrorist plots in the ensuing quarter century and some that succeeded.
“The threat did not go away — it receded — but it is still there, and there are still many thousands of extremists in the world who wish us a great deal of ill,” she said. Clinton argued that the U.S. needs to overcome its internal divisions and confront threats from both nation-state adversaries, like Russia, China and Iran, and nonstate adversaries, like terrorist groups.
She lashed out at President Donald Trump for spending so much attention on his planned White House ballroom. “When you’re more interested in building your ballroom than figuring out what the intelligence is coming out of Afghanistan — that is absolutely contrary to any kind of sensible decision-making,” she said.
Clinton accused the Trump administration of dismantling parts of the federal government, including within the State Department, that traditionally collected intelligence and evaluated these terrorist threats. As a result, she said, the U.S. doesn’t have “eyes and ears in a lot of these countries,” including in western Africa, where she said extremism is taking hold.
The administration cut thousands of jobs across the federal government last year as part of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency effort, including at the CIA and the State Department.
“I am increasingly concerned because I don’t think we are focused. I know there are very dedicated people still in the government, you know, in the FBI, in the intelligence agencies. I understand that,” she said. “But they don’t have ... the resources, and they’re not given the kind of mission focus that they need right now to adequately do their jobs.”
Reached for comment, the White House referred NBC News to the Department of Homeland Security.
A spokesperson for DHS told NBC News in an email: “Despite multiple Democrat shutdowns of DHS, the Department is more than equipped to keep Americans safe in an ever-changing threat landscape. DHS has been recruiting, reforming, and modernizing at a record pace—including in areas of counterterrorism.”
During the interview, Clinton also reflected on the revelations about the toxic air quality in Manhattan after 9/11, recalling her experience at ground zero. “It looked like a black curtain,” she said. “There was particulates. ... There was, you know, acrid smells. My throat hurt.”
Asked if misleading information about the air from the Bush administration at the time was deliberate, bad science or an effort to reassure the public, Clinton said it was “all three.”
“I think that there was a certain element of some leaders being unwilling to face the truth because they wanted to get the economy going,” she said. “They wanted to get Wall Street open. They wanted people to feel like normalcy was possible, and so they either deliberately ignored or they didn’t ask the right questions.”
She also responded to Jon Stewart, comedian and 9/11 health advocate, who said that the U.S. has lost nearly 10,000 people to 9/11-related illnesses, which is three times as many people as the nearly 3,000 killed in the twin towers.
Addressing the fact that there are people experiencing these health effects that aren’t registered for programs intended to help these victims, Clinton said, “There needs to be a concerted effort to fund this expanded outreach and screening and treatment. And I would hope that the city, the state and the federal government would join together to do that.”
