A national security adviser to Ben Carson claims the presidential candidate continues to struggle with foreign policy, particularly concerning the Middle East.
The adviser reportedly said the candidate required weekly conference calls to “make him smart.”
“Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East,” said Duane Clarridge, a top adviser to Carson told the New York Times.
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“We need to have a conference call once a week where his guys roll out the subjects they think will be out there, and we can make him smart,” Clarridge said he told Armstrong Williams, who serves as Carson’s business manager.
The Carson campaign, however, fired back at Clarridge, 82, and (more specifically) The Times, saying in a statement that the news outlet is taking “advantage of an elderly gentleman.”
“Mr. Clarridge has incomplete knowledge of the daily, not weekly briefings, that Dr. Carson receives on important national security matters from former military and State Department officials,” said Doug Watts, a Carson campaign spokesman.
“He is coming to the end of a long career of serving our country. Mr. Clarridge’s input to Dr. Carson is appreciated but he is clearly not one of Dr. Carson’s top advisors,” Watts said. “For the New York Times to take advantage of an elderly gentleman and use him as their foil in this story is an affront to good journalistic practices.”
Clarridge’s comments come on the heels of the recent terror attack in Paris, in which terrorists brutally attacked the French capital’s downtown. They also come two days after Carson appeared on “Fox News Sunday,” during which he was pressed on foreign policy almost exclusively and received low marks for his performance. Even Williams appeared to concede the candidate struggled.
“He’s been briefed on it so many times, I guess he just froze,” Williams said of the interview, during which Carson was unable to tell the host which nations he would call on to form a coalition to combat the Islamic State, which took responsibility for Friday’s attack in Paris.
“Sometimes he overthinks things. I could tell, talking to him, it was a bummer for him,” Williams added about the interview.
Clarridge also took on Carson’s multiple claims recently that China is intervening militarily in Syria, an assertion disputed by both the White House and China.
