Cruz goes after Rubio on foreign policy
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is going after Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) on foreign policy, tying his Republican presidential rival to Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton on Libya.
{mosads}“Senator Rubio emphatically supported Hillary Clinton in toppling [Muammar] Qaddafi in Libya. I think that made no sense,” Cruz said in an interview with Bloomberg Politics on Monday.
“Qaddafi was a bad man, he had a horrible human rights record. And yet … he had become a significant ally in fighting radical Islamic terrorism,” Cruz said of the Libyan leader who was toppled in 2011.
“The terrorist attack that occurred in Benghazi was a direct result of that massive foreign policy blunder,” Cruz told Bloomberg, referring to the 2012 attacks on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead.
Cruz and Rubio have sparred since the latest GOP debate earlier this month on the topic of immigration and homeland security. Rubio, among the most hawkish in the GOP field, has gone after Cruz on the topic of surveillance in the wake of the Paris attacks.
“While Senator Cruz voted to gut US intelligence programs and make Americans less safe, nobody has shown a better understanding of the threats we face in the 21st Century than Marco,” Rubio spokesman Alex Conant told Bloomberg when asked to respond to Cruz’s verbal attacks.
Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.