Vice President-elect Mike Pence on Sunday refused to say if the new Trump administration would rule out waterboarding of the nation's enemies.
In an interview on CBS News' "Face the Nation," Pence was asked to respond to GOP Arizona Sen. John McCain's fiery remarks that "I don't give a damn what the president of the United States wants to do… we will not water board. We will not torture."
"What I can tell you is going forward, as he outlined in that famous speech in Ohio, that a President Donald Trump is going to focus on confronting and defeating radical Islamic terrorism as a threat to this country," Pence said.
"And we're going to have a president who will never say what we'll never do."
"I think in President-elect Donald Trump, you have someone who believes that we shouldn't be telling the enemy what our tactics or our strategies are," he added.
Pressed on whether the Trump administration may reassess the nation's current stance against waterboarding, Pence doubled down.
"I think the president-elect made his views on that quite clear during the course of the campaign," he said of Trump, who has endorsed the idea of waterboarding "and a hell of a lot worse" against the nation's enemies.
"But as we go forward, what I can tell you is it's not going to be about a specific tactic," he said. "What I see in these meetings with the president-elect and candidates for our national security and our national defense is someone who is determined to surround himself with men and women of extraordinary background and capability."
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