Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor said on Monday that her story “joins a growing list of instances in which Senator Clinton has exaggerated her role in foreign and domestic policy-making”.
During a speech about Iraq last week, Clinton said of the March 1996 Bosnia trip: “I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”
The Obama campaign carried Internet links to a CBS news video taken from the Bosnia trip and posted on YouTube. It showed Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea, walking across the tarmac from a large cargo plane, smiling and waving, and stopping to shake hands with Bosnia’s acting president and greet an eight-year-old girl.
Asked about the issue during a meeting with the Philadelphia Daily News’ editorial board on Monday, Clinton said she “misspoke”.
‘Misstatement’
“I went to 80 countries. I gave contemporaneous accounts, I wrote about a lot of this in my book. I think that, a minor blip, if I said something that, you know, I say a lot of things, millions of words a day. So if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement,” she said.
Clinton often cites the trip as a part of her foreign policy experience, which she claims gives her an advantage over Obama.