Donald Trump on Monday brought his vision for a stronger military and safer country before a veterans group in Virginia, telling the assembly that cybersecurity "will be an immediate and top priority."
Trump kicked off the town hall-style Q&A with the Retired American Warriors in Herndon, Virginia, by pledging a "thorough review of our cyber defenses and weaknesses" while linking Hillary Clinton's cybersecurity efforts for her own gain.
"Hillary Clinton's only experience in cybersecurity involves her criminal scheme to violate federal law, engineering a massive cover-up and putting the entire nation in harm's way," Trump said. "The fact that a former senator and secretary of state claimed not to know what the letter "C" means is just one more example why she is totally unfit to hold the office of president. Totally unfit."
Trump said cybersecurity would be a chief priority if he were elected.
"As president improving cybersecurity will be an immediate and top priority for my administration," Trump said. "One of the very first things I will do is to order a thorough review of our cyberdefenses and weaknesses. We have very substantial weaknesses, including all vital infrastructure."
Interestingly, Trump included Russia as a cyber threat after saying during the first debate that it could be a 400-pound guy in his bed instead.
"Cyber attacks from foreign governments especially China, Russia, North Korea, along with non-state terrorist actors, and organized criminal groups constitute one much our most critical national security concerns." Trump said. "They're learning everything about us.
"The scope of our cyber problem is enormous."
Trump vowed to appoint an attorney general who would "reform the department of justice, like it was necessary after Watergate."
"My attorney general will restore the integrity of the Department of Justice which has been severely questioned," Trump said, taking another shot at Clinton.
"When you have somebody getting a subpoena from the United States Congress to have your emails and all other information sent and after, not before, after getting the subpoena, 33,000 emails are deleted and acid washed and nobody even knows what that means, acid washed," Trump said. "That is very expensive thing to do. … When you see something like that, and there is no crime … I can't think of anything … much more serious than that. Hard to believe that they can get away with this kind of thing."
In the Q&A that followed, Trump made several other pledges and promises that would be the hallmarks of a safer America:
- "We're going to build up our forces. We have no choice. We cannot have a depleted military. We have to have the strongest military by far.
- "We have such divide and really divides, we have many different forms of divides. So there's a lot of confusion. But, we have a president that won't use the term, radical Islamic terrorism, won't use it. Will spend long periods of time explaining to people why he won't use it. At the end of the explanation nobody knows why he still won't use it because the explanation is no good.
- "The American public doesn't have to know the date and hour and second that we're going to attack and from what side we're going to attack. They just want to see victory.
- "We have to change that whole (VA) system. It starts with management. We have to have a whole different set of protocols and we have to get people off the lines.
- "We're gonna get away from political correctness. We have a politically correct military and is getting more and more politically correct every day and a lot of the great people in this room don't even understand how it's possible to do that. And that's through intelligence, not through ignorance, believe me, some of the things they're asking you to do and be politically correct about are ridiculous.
- "One of the things I'm going to do, and I have tremendous support with evangelicals and Christians and everybody is we are going to get rid of the Johnson amendment that is very, very unfair.
- "So we are going to be addressing that very strongly … the whole mental health issue is going to be a very important issue."
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