Press. voanews.com
The leading U.S.
presidential candidates, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump,
traded barbs Monday over the weekend bombing in New York, as Clinton called for
new online surveillance to thwart terrorist plots and Trump renewed his call
for an immigration crackdown.
Clinton, a
former U.S. secretary of state seeking to become the country's first female
president, said she wants a new "intelligence surge." She said she
hopes to enlist experts in the country's Silicon Valley technology hub in
California to help devise ways to monitor internet conversations among plotters
"to counter terrorism attacks before they occur." "Let us be
vigilant, but not afraid," Clinton told reporters in New York. "We
choose resolve, not fear."
Trump's reaction
Trump, in an
interview on the Fox television network, called again for tightening
immigration standards for people entering the United States, as authorities
identified a U.S. citizen of Afghan descent as linked to Saturday's New York
bombing that injured 29 people and said a Somali-American was the man who
stabbed nine people at a Minnesota shopping mall in the central part of the
country before police shot him to death. He said, "Hillary Clinton wants
to allow hundreds of thousands of these same people" into the United
States.
Trump, a real
estate mogul running for elected office for the first time, said U.S. police
know who "a lot of these people are" but "are afraid to do
anything" to stop attacks because they do not want to be accused of racial
profiling.
Trump said his
call for tougher immigration control "isn't just something that I
developed overnight" because of the latest attacks. "I knew this was
going to happen." Clinton pledged that she, too, wants "tough
vetting," but said the county is "well equipped" to meet the
challenge of keeping out would-be terrorists.
"And we can
do so with keeping smart law enforcement, good intelligence, and in concert
with our values," she said. Clinton contended that Trump's
anti-immigration rhetoric has been "used online for recruitment of
terrorists."
Trump, on his
Twitter account, said, "Under the leadership of [President Barack] Obama
& Clinton, Americans have experienced more attacks at home than victories
abroad. Time to change the playbook!"
Clinton touts
experience
Clinton derided
Trump's assessment, saying, "It's like so much else he says. It's not
grounded in fact. It's meant to make some kind of demagogic point." "I'm
the only candidate in this race who has been part of the hard decisions to take
terrorists off the battlefield," she said, "I won't get into
classified information, but I have sat at that table in the situation room.
I've analyzed the threats. I've contributed to actions that neutralized our
enemies. I know how to do this."
Trump claimed
credit for accurately calling the weekend explosion in New York a bombing on
Saturday even before full details were disclosed by police. "What I said
was exactly correct," Trump said. "I should be a newscaster because I
called it before the news." In the early hours after the explosion,
Clinton also referred to it as a bombing, but chided Trump for his initial
reaction. "I think it's always wiser to wait until you have information
before making conclusions because we are just in the beginning stages of trying
to determine what happened," she said.
Latest polls
The latest U.S.
national surveys show Trump has erased almost all of Clinton's
eight-percentage-point edge she held in early August. RealClearPolitics says
its average of national polling shows Clinton with a lead of just nine-tenths
of a percentage point, although The New York Times said its average shows
Clinton ahead by 44-42 percent. Trump and Clinton are set to square off face to
face in the first of their three scheduled presidential debates on September
26.
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