President Obama’s spokesman cast doubt today on Hillary Clinton’s claim, during last night’s Democratic debate, that she decided to oppose the recently negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free-trade deal after reviewing its details.
A reporter asked White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest how Clinton could have reviewed the deal given that the text of the agreement has not yet been made public. “Yeah, I noticed that, too,” Earnest said. “It certainly is relevant for you and others to say the details matter in this instance. We would agree; that’s why we spent more than five years negotiating the agreement. And we look forward to, as soon as possible, being able to put forward the text of the agreement so that everybody can review it and make their own judgements.”
That’s an implicit rebuke to Clinton, who described the TPP as “the gold standard” for such agreements in 2012, but now claims to have changed her view after looking at the final text. “It was just finally negotiated last week, and in looking at it, it didn’t meet my standards,” she said during the debate.
Earnest declined to say he was “disappointed” with Clinton, though. “Secretary Clinton did not express her strong support for trade-promotion–authority legislation, but yet over the course of the summer, the administration did succeed in building a bipartisan majority in both the House and the Senate for that trade-promotion–authority legislation,” he said.
— Joel Gehrke is a political reporter for National Review.
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