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, along with non-state adversaries like terrorist groups.She lashed out at President Donald Trump in her remarks 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 DOGE effort, including at the CIA and the State...