AP Photo Hillary Clinton urges U.S. to take thousands of Syrian refugees

Hillary Clinton said on Sunday the United States should do more to help Syrian refugees, calling for it to take in as many as 65,000 of them.

“We’re facing the worst refugee crisis since the end of World War II,” the former secretary of state said on CBS’s "Face the Nation." “I think the United States has to do more, and I’d like to see us move from what is a good start with 10,000 to 65,000.”


Her remarks, her most specific so far on the crisis, came during her first appearance on a Sunday news show in four years. They came the same day that Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking in Germany, said the U.S. would increase the number of refugees accepted.

Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, also said George W. Bush had a “mixed” record keeping the country safe, condemned Donald Trump, defended her record at the State Department and insisted, “I am a real person.”

Asked by host John Dickerson to evaluate Jeb Bush’s statement that his brother kept the country safe after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Clinton said, “I do give President Bush credit for trying to bring the country together around threats that we did face."

"I’ve said the war in Iraq was a mistake. I supported what happened in Afghanistan," she added. "So if you sort it all out, it’s a mixed picture.” As a senator from New York, Clinton voted to authorize the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Following a Thursday incident in which Donald Trump did not correct a questioner who asserted Muslims are a “problem” and that President Barack Obama is a Muslim, Clinton built on her criticism of the Republican frontrunner, saying he has a responsibility to keep his supporters from getting out of control.

“He is spewing a level of paranoia and prejudice against all kinds of people,” Clinton said. “When you light those fires, you better recognize that they can get out of control. And he should start dampening them down and putting them out.”

Clinton also defended her record as secretary of state.

She denied that political considerations were behind the Obama administration’s initial line that the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, was inspired by an Islamophobic video, saying she personally felt no political pressure to adopt the line.

While continuing to defend her decision to store official emails on a private server during her tenure as secretary of state, Clinton clarified what exactly she was sorry for in her recent apology about the email controversy.

“I'm sorry that I made a choice that has raised all of these questions because I don't like reading, you know, that people have questions about what I did and how I did it,” she said.

The interview ended on a light, if awkward, note.

Asked to list three words that define “the real Hillary Clinton,” the former secretary of state burst out laughing.

“Just three? I can't possibly do that,” she said. “I mean, look, I am a real person with all the pluses and minuses that go along with being that. And I've been in the public eye for so long that I think, you know, it's like the feature that you see in some magazines sometimes, 'Real people actually go shopping,' you know?"

