A top official under former President George W. Bush said he will be voting for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in November.
Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state under Bush from 2001 to 2005, told Politico that he is supporting Clinton over Trump should he be the GOP nominee because he isn’t sure that Trump is actually a Republican.
“If Donald Trump is the nominee, I would vote for Hillary Clinton,” Armitage said. “He doesn’t appear to be to be a Republican, he doesn’t appear to want to learn about issues. So I’m going to vote for Mrs. Clinton.”
Armitage becomes the highest-ranking former GOP national security officer to pick Clinton over Trump, though a handful of other top Republican foreign policy have said they will not support Trump.
Though he is unsure if more Republicans will come forward and pick Clinton over Trump, Armitage said that many of his conservative friends with national security backgrounds are “in kind of a fog” over who to pick.
Armitage, who emerged as a critic of the Iraq War, became a household name in 2006 when he admitted to publicly releasing the identity CIA agent Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak. He said it was an accident and part of a “casual conversation” and was never charged in the federal investigation.
