Would Bill Clinton get a West Wing office?
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said her husband, former President Bill Clinton, is a "great adviser" but isn't sure exactly what role he'd play if she were elected president.
"So he'll have a West Wing office if you get there?" host Chuck Todd asked Clinton during an interview with MSNBC's "MTP Daily" that aired Monday.
"He's a pretty busy guy. I don't know anything like that," Clinton responded. "But I'm not counting my chickens before they hatch."
Clinton weighed in on a range of foreign policy issues during the interview, including how she would handle the conflict in Syria. She said she would prioritize both ousting President Bashar al-Assad and fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
"You can't really do one without the other," she said.
She also said that removing Assad from power must be a political process, because a military process is not possible.
"We have our hands full with ISIS. And I think part of the challenge that President Obama's been facing is to build up the Iraqi forces again" after they were decimated by former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, she said.
Clinton was an early advocate of arming the Syrian rebels, and she argued that the U.S. might have made more progress on the ground if the strategy she and then-CIA Director David Petraeus proposed had been adopted by the administration in 2012. Given the current set of circumstances on the ground -- including a Russian buildup of troops inside Syria to support the Assad regime -- Clinton said the U.S. needs to find a way to work with Russia.
"We have an additional challenge in trying to figure out how we work with them or how we try to prevent them from making a bad situation worse," she said.
She defended the U.S. intervention in Libya, another one of her foreign policy prescriptions from her time in the Obama administration. In the years following the death of former President Muammar Qaddafi, the country has seen a significant amount of turmoil.
"You've got to go back and see where we were. And remember, Gaddafi had American blood on his hands," Clinton said. "Well, I think that not just the United States, there were others who were involved in trying to, you know, prevent a mass massacre across Libya. And I think a lot of effort should've gone in to support."
On domestic issues, Clinton talked about her stance on abortion and said that there could be some restrictions on abortions in "the very end of the third trimester" that are still consistent with the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade.
"If there is a way to structure some kind of constitutional restrictions that take into account the life of the mother and her health, then I'm open to that. But I have yet to see the Republicans willing to actually do that. And that would be an area, where if they included health, you could see constitutional actions," she said.
Asked what would make her a better Democratic nominee than her principal rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, Clinton said she wouldn't criticize Sanders but cited the support she has received among their colleagues.
"I think it is significant that people that have worked with me in the Congress when I wasn't running for president, even Republicans were praising me," Clinton said. "But the fact now that I have so many of my Democratic colleagues, present and former, in the House and the Senate, out in state Houses who are lined up to say, you know, 'This is the person we want to see as president,' is very gratifying. Because they look at what they think I can do for them."