Defensive in national security forum...

Clinton, Trump on defensive in national security forum

Neither candidate did much to advance their case to voters, while Democrats raged at the event's tight format.

By Gabriel Debenedetti

Hillary Clinton spent a third of the time fending off questions about her emails. Donald Trump struggled to explain his secret plan to defeat the Islamic State.

Both presidential candidates walked into Wednesday night’s national security forum seeking to prove themselves ready to serve as commander in chief. Clinton sought to showcase her superior experience, and Trump to indict her foreign policy along with President Barack Obama’s. Instead, both almost immediately found themselves on the defensive.

The Democratic nominee, appearing first at the “Commander-in-Chief Forum” held by NBC News and a veteran’s group, was hit with a barrage of detailed questions about her use of a private email system as secretary of state, as well as her initial support of the Iraq war — both of which she has called mistakes.

Her Republican counterpart, meanwhile, faced broader queries about his qualifications for the Oval Office, his many past controversial statements about the state of the military, and even his apparent admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The result was a scattered hour at the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum that set the stage for a particularly bitter lead-up to the first presidential debate in under three weeks — where the candidates will not be constrained by the guidelines put in place on Wednesday by moderator Matt Lauer that they should refrain from attacking each other.

The evening began on shaky footing for Clinton almost immediately, as she carefully weighed her answer to Lauer’s opening question about the FBI’s conclusion that she was “extremely careless” in handling classified information.

“I have a lot of experience dealing with classified material,” Clinton said defensively, her jaw setting. “Classified material has a header which has ’top secret,’ ’secret,’ ‘confidential.’ Nothing — and I will repeat this, and this is verified in the report by the Department of Justice, none of the emails sent or received by me had such a header,” she explained.

It took Clinton nearly one-third of her allotted half-hour to work in a shot at her GOP rival, but her opening answer — that a commander-in-chief must have “absolute rock steadiness” — was also a potential dig at a man her campaign has portrayed as erratic and untested.

Clinton noted that Trump, who appeared at the forum separately, supported invading Iraq, but found herself forced to answer yet again why she had voted to give President George W. Bush the green light.

"I think the decision to go to war in Iraq, and I have said that my voting to give President Bush that authority was, from my perspective, my mistake,” she said, promising yet again not to commit ground troops to Iraq “ever again” and ruling out additional ground troops in Syria.

“I also believe that it is imperative that we learn from the mistakes like after-action reports are supposed to do, so we must learn what led us down that path so it never happens again,” she said.

Trump, appearing after Clinton, insisted to Lauer that he had opposed the war — despite telling radio host Howard Stern in 2002 that he supported it — quickly turning to criticize the current state of American foreign policy under Obama.

Presented with his past statement that he knows more about ISIS than “the generals,” Trump responded that those same generals he would have to work with “have been reduced to rubble” under Obama’s leadership.

And he repeated his lament that the United States failed to “take the oil” in Iraq, an idea that national security experts across the political spectrum have panned as ludicrous.

Thought Lauer missed an opportunity to corner Trump on his support for the war, he did press the Republican nominee on an apparent contradiction between his declaration that he would have top generals present him with a blueprint to defeat ISIS with his longstanding intimation that he already has a secret plan to do so.

“I have a substantial chance of winning, but if I win I don’t want to broadcast [the plan],” Trump explained. “The fact is, we have had the worst — and you could say the dumbest — foreign policy."

Trump was perhaps most emphatic in defending his past comments about Putin, despite the fodder those remarks have provided for attacks from Clinton and her allies.

“I think when he calls me brilliant I’ll take the compliment, but it’s not going to get him anywhere,” Trump told Lauer, who had just listed a roster of controversial Russian moves, including Moscow’s reported culpability for the hack of the Democratic National Committee earlier this year.

Trump responded that Putin has an 82 percent approval rating in Russia: “He’s been a leader far more than our president has been a leader.”

And, as part of his answer to a question posed by a father who said his daughter was concerned about rising incidents of sexual assault in the military, Trump also stood by a past tweet suggesting that allowing women to serve — rather than lax enforcement of military discipline — was to blame.

If Clinton appeared defensive and cautious in answering the specific, pointed questions posed to her, Trump also stumbled with the broader queries Lauer offered him. At one point, he corrected a veteran who had lost two friends to suicide about veteran suicide statistics — when she in fact had the right number, shaking her head at his retort.

His defense of Putin was politically dodgy, too — the Russian leader’s American approval rating is in the single digits, according to an NBC News survey conducted even before the DNC hack that his government is widely believed to be behind.

And his insistence that the generals currently serving had “been reduced to rubble” neared crossing a line in military circles because of the implication that he would replace officers who are not political appointees.

Tensions boiled over between Democrats and NBC News, as well, as they questioned Lauer's questioning: "@NBCNews it is irresponsible to allow Trump to go on a 60 second rant about a military intervention that he supported w/o clarifying," tweeted Clinton's traveling press secretary, Nick Merrill.

The forum landed in the wake of new NBC News/Survey Monkey polling showing that Trump holds a substantial lead over Clinton when it comes to military and veteran voters — a crucial voting bloc in states like Virginia -- 55 percent to 36 percent overall. Even so, as the two campaigns spar over the numbers of military endorsers each has, Trump’s poll numbers in the military community are lower than either Mitt Romney's in 2012 or John McCain’s in 2008 relative to Obama’s.

After a summer of Clinton bombarding Trump’s fitness for the office and a stretch in which he saw his support waver after clashing with the parents of a deceased soldier, however, this week’s pitches are not just targeted at the significant military community: They are each campaign’s latest attempt to appeal to middle-class voters concerned about national security and their own safety.

While Trump has gone after Clinton aggressively over her emails, she has responded by pointing out some of his policy inconsistencies on the trail and specifically identifying his ties to Russia as particularly troubling.

Prior to the event, members of the Trump team spent pieces of the morning playing defense after Clinton’s super PAC, Priorities USA Action, promoted an ad that prominently featured the candidate declaring his love for war, the latest in a series of spots from both the campaign and super PAC making the case that Trump is far too inconsistent and unpredictable to sit in the Oval Office or have control of the nuclear codes. But on Wednesday, the man who once promised to “bomb the hell out of ISIS" spit the accusation right back at his opponent.

“The current strategy of toppling regimes, with no plan for what to do the day after, only produces power vacuums that are filled by terrorists,” Trump said earlier in the day at a speech in Philadelphia. “Immediately after taking office, I will ask my generals to present me with a plan within 30 days to defeat and destroy ISIS."

Even as he called for a massive increase in the military budget, Trump suggested he would more judicious in using force -- upending the traditional partisan battles lines on national security.

“Unlike my opponent, my foreign policy will emphasize diplomacy, not destruction. Hillary Clinton’s legacy in Iraq, Libya, and Syria has produced only turmoil and suffering,” he said in Pennsylvania, skipping over his own one-time support for intervention in some of those conflicts.

“Sometimes it has seemed like there wasn’t a country in the Middle East that Hillary Clinton didn’t want to invade, intervene or topple. She is trigger-happy and unstable when it comes to war,” he said.