Flynn: Clinton 'really stupid' for bringing up former Miss Universe

Introducing former Miss Universe Alicia Machado into the presidential news cycle was “a really stupid decision” by Hillary Clinton, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn said Friday morning.

The former secretary of state introduced Machado to debate viewers Monday night when she dropped her name while discussing Donald Trump’s history of derogatory remarks towards women. Clinton said Trump had called Machado “Miss Housekeeping,” a reference to her Hispanic heritage, and “Miss Piggy,” because of her supposed weight gain after winning the pageant.


Since then, Machado has done multiple interviews offering further detail on Trump’s treatment of her as Miss Universe and the Clinton campaign has released an ad telling her story. The GOP nominee’s camp has worked to discredit her by recalling her involvement in a 1998 attempted murder investigation in which she was never charged and accusing her of starring in pornographic films despite any evidence to support the claim. Trump himself said last Tuesday that Machado was “the worst we ever had” as a Miss Universe winner because “she gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem.”

On Friday, Flynn, a top Trump surrogate, dismissed Machado’s turn in the political news cycle as the invention of Clinton’s campaign, aided by a left-leaning media.

“Number one, there is an absolute coordinated attack by not only the Clinton machine but the mainstream media. So that's a given. The American public know it, they can see it and this is just part of it,” he told Fox News’s “Fox and Friends. “This really shows or demonstrates real poor judgment on Hillary Clinton’s part to choose somebody to try to take on this women’s issue, which I think was a really stupid decision on her part.”

Instead, Flynn said Trump, who spent Friday morning tweeting out attacks at Machado, should get back the “big issues” of the campaign, like national security, taxes and the military. He said “those are the kinds of issues that we have got to continue to talk about and beat the drum on and not keeping falling back to this trap of what Hillary Clinton and her poor judgment has demonstrated for three decades.”

“I think part of it is how she has treated, how Hillary Clinton has poorly treated women for many, many years, and I think it came up a bunch of times the other night,” Flynn said. “I mean, all these new ideas, all these good ideas that Hillary Clinton has, why hasn't she been doing this for the last 25, 30 years?”