GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump said Friday he didn’t know if President George W. Bush lied in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
“I don’t know if he lied or not. He could have lied. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. I guess you’d have to ask him,” Mr. Trump said on NBC’s “Today” program.
Mr. Trump went on to say the decision to go into Iraq was one of the worst decisions in U.S. history.
At the GOP debate last Saturday, Mr. Trump had said the Iraq War was a mistake that cost the U.S. trillions of dollars.
“They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction; there were none, and they knew there were none,” Mr. Trump had said at the debate.
At a CNN town hall Thursday night in South Carolina, Mr. Trump had said: “Well, a lot of people agree with what I said. And I’m not talking about lying, I’m not talking about not lying. Nobody really knows why we went into Iraq.”
On Friday, Mr. Trump was also asked about a 2002 interview with radio host Howard Stern, uncovered recently by Buzzfeed, in which he replied “Yeah, I guess so” when Mr. Stern asked him if he was for invading Iraq.
“It’s the first time the question was ever asked [of] me — that was long before the war started,” Mr. Trump said. “By the time the war started, and you have documentation of this, by the time the war started, I was against it.”
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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