Checking Christie's claim that Clinton called Syria's Assad a "reformer"

Among the many Gov. Chris Christie's indictments against Hillary Clinton at the second night of the Republican National Convention was an accusation that the former secretary of state referred to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as a "reformer."

"In Syria, imagine this, imagine this. [Clinton] called President Assad a 'reformer.' She called Assad a 'different kind of leader,' " Christie said Tuesday night. "There's now 400,000 now dead -- think about that. Four hundred thousand dead at the hands of a man that Hillary defended."

In a 2011 interview on "Face the Nation," host Bob Schieffer pressed Mrs. Clinton on Syrian policy, specifically, on why she and the Obama administration were approaching the conflict in Syria differently than they had in Libya.

Clinton did use the word "reformer," but there's more to the sentence than Christie quoted. Here are her exact remarks, according to a Face the Nation transcript:

"There is a different leader in Syria now. Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he's a reformer. What's been happening there the last few weeks is - is deeply concerning. But there's a difference between calling out aircraft and indiscriminately strafing and bombing your own cities, then police actions, which frankly have exceeded the use of force that any of us would want to see."

She was paraphrasing members of Congress on Assad and not volunteering an opinion of her own, the she did say that "both parties" felt that way about him.

But it's not clear that both parties did feel that way about Assad. A Washington Post fact check was unable to identify Republican lawmakers who traveled to Syria in "recent months" and suggested that Assad was a "reformer." The Post did find 13 Republicans who were skeptical of Assad, though. The New York Times at one point referred to "some in the George W. Bush administration [who] had also expressed hope that [Assad] would be a better leader than his father, Hafez al-Assad."

The then-chairman of the Sen. Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, blasted the Assad regime and criticized the leader's unwillingness to "promise concrete reforms."

Overall, it seems that Christie's indictment of Clinton on this issue has some truth to it, but isn't entirely true. She did use the word "reformer," but she was referencing the opinions of others. And she said "a different leader" not "a different kind of leader." Christie implies she was praising Assad, whereas her comments were more measured than he suggested. By 2012, she was saying that Assad had to go.