Carson Advisor Gets Candid About Problems of ‘Making Him Smart’ on Foreign Policy
One of the issues that’s been raised on the campaign trail has been Ben Carson‘s lack of foreign policy experience, especially now when national security is at the forefront of people’s minds. He’s previously defended this by saying, “There’s nobody who knows everything. And I think the people who do the best are the ones who know how to utilize experts around them.”
But one of the people Carson is already consulting is a little wary of his foreign policy chops.
Duane Clarridge, a top advisor to Carson on terrorism and national security, told The New York Times, “Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East.”
On Fox News Sunday this week, Chris Wallace repeatedly pressed Carson on which nations he would call to form an anti-ISIS coalition. Armstrong Williams, a close Carson adviser, said he probably “just froze” because he’s been briefed on it “many times.”
But Clarridge said briefings might not be working:
But the briefings do not always seem to sink in, Mr. Clarridge acknowledged. After Mr. Carson struggled on “Fox News Sunday” to say whom he would call first to form a coalition against the Islamic State, Mr. Clarridge called Mr. Williams, the candidate’s top adviser, in frustration. “We need to have a conference call once a week where his guys roll out the subjects they think will be out there, and we can make him smart,” Mr. Clarridge said he told Mr. Williams.
UPDATE –– 4:59 pm EST: The Carson campaign responded in a lengthy statement to Business Insider that, for some reason, invokes Clarridge’s age:
“Mr. Clarridge has incomplete knowledge of the daily, not weekly briefings, that Dr. Carson receives on important national security matters from former military and State Department officials,” Doug Watts, a Carson campaign spokesman, told Business Insider in an email.
“He is coming to the end of a long career of serving our country. Mr. Clarridge’s input to Dr. Carson is appreciated but he is clearly not one of Dr. Carson’s top advisors. For the New York Times to take advantage of an elderly gentleman and use him as their foil in this story is an affront to good journalistic practices.”
[image via screengrab]
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