Trump on 9/11: I don't blame anybody in the government, but the buck stopped with Bush

“You always have to look to the person at the top,” Trump said Saturday in a telephone interview. “Do I blame George Bush? I only say that he was the president at the time, and you know, you could say the buck stops here.”

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So why might one consider Bush responsible?

No. 1: Bush’s immigration policy. “We had very weak immigration laws,” Trump said, adding that perhaps if Bush had had a Trump-style immigration policy, replete with “the strong laws that I’m wanting, these terrorists wouldn’t have been in the country.”

No. 2: People knew that the FBI, the National Security Council, and the CIA weren’t sharing information about potential threats. “They were not talking to each other,” Trump said. “If I’m president, I want to have my three most important agencies talking to each other and coordinating with each other.”

And No. 3: George Tenet, Bush’s director of central intelligence, “knew in advance that there would be an attack, and he said that.”

“I don’t blame anybody,” Trump continued, after listing those points. “But it’s possible,” he continued, that had the administration had stronger policy on those points, “perhaps something could have been done that was obviously better than the worst attack ever perpetrated on the United States.”

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