Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton ripped the Trump administration on Thursday, saying the State Department had been decimated.
“We have decimated our State Department. Foreign service officers with decades of experience have either been ignored or in some cases pushed so hard that they have resigned,” the former secretary of State told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
Clinton went on to argue that there was no strategy in the department under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
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“There’s no real plan. What I hear from inside of the department, because I still have a lot of communication coming to me, is that there’s a very small group of people around Tillerson, none of them experienced diplomats that he has brought in to be his palace guards, so to speak,” she said.
“They don’t even reach out into the State Department to talk to the people who have studied North Korea for years. So they’re not getting the expertise and experience that is still at the State Department.”
Clinton, who served as secretary of State under former President Barack Obama, said she has not had any communication with Tillerson since Trump took office in January.
Her comments Thursday came as Tillerson revealed plans to reform the State Department, potentially slashing billions from its budget over the next five years and shaving nearly 2,000 jobs through reforms.
Her remarks in an interview promoting her new book also came after the U.S. and other countries said North Korea had fired a ballistic missile over Japan.
Clinton told Maddow that the president needed to halt his aggressive rhetoric toward Pyongyang and resort to more diplomatic measure.
“Get over the Twitter stuff and get on to the diplomatic negotiations,” she said.