Mitt Romney said he was heartened that President Donald Trump would seek him out. | AP Photo Romney reveals that Clinton nudged him to consider Trump’s secretary of state overture

DEER VALLEY, UTAH — Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney revealed on Friday that Hillary Clinton encouraged him to consider serving as President Donald Trump’s secretary of state.

Romney, appearing before a group of major Republican Party donors here, said that he reached out to Clinton last year after getting a phone call from then-Vice President-elect Mike Pence informing him that he was on the shortlist for secretary of state.


The 2012 GOP nominee said he was “shocked” to receive the overture. Throughout the 2016 campaign, he had been one of Trump’s most strident critics.

Romney, who was golfing in Hawaii when he received the call, said he told Pence at first that he would have to think about it. He then turned to former secretaries of state, including the just-defeated Clinton, to ask whether he should consent to the offer.

“In each case, each of them said, ‘Please, please take that job if it’s offered to you. We’d very much like to see you serve in that capacity,’” Romney said.

The former governor said he was heartened that Trump would seek him out — and that it offered evidence that the president-elect was interested in seeking out a diverse array of viewpoints.

“Why would I consider it? It’s not that at that point I suddenly had a different view of the president and the things that I had felt about him in the past. But instead, I was very concerned about the fact that we saw things very differently on the foreign policy front with regards to Russia, Syria, Afghanistan, North Korea, China. NATO. Almost across the board, we were miles apart,” he said.

“And the idea that the president-elect would say, ‘I’d like to consider you as my secretary of state,’ suggests to me he’d be open to the kind of perspectives I might provide,” Romney added.

Had he been offered the job, Romney said, he would have taken it. But he also said Trump ultimately made the right decision in not tapping him because they differed on so many issues. He related one meeting in which Trump pressed him for how to handle Syria. When Romney responded by proposing three different options, the president-elect said he disagreed with them.

Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, was quick to heap praise on the man Trump ultimately did choose: former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson.

“By the way, he chose someone else, and I thought that was a very good choice,” he said.

The remarks, his most extensive since the secretary of state search came to an end, came on the second day of the E2 Summit, an annual Romney-hosted gathering that brings together many of his former contributors and political allies.

He was questioned during the event by Spencer Zwick, a longtime political adviser. Over the course of the nearly 35-minute interview, Romney offered some praise for Trump’s early tenure, complimenting him on recent policies he’d embraced regarding NATO and China and his nomination of Neil Gorsuch to serve as a Supreme Court justice.

Yet he also offered criticisms. With the White House consumed by chaos and palace intrigue, the former governor said the president needed to redirect focus to passing legislation.

“We could reduce some of the temperature around those things, the theater, and more and more about the policy things that are going to make a real difference in the lives of Americans,” he said.

Toward the end of the interview, Zwick pressed Romney to weigh in on Trump’s “Make America Great Again Platform.”

Romney — in a remark that some in the audience perceived as an indirect swipe at Trump’s nationalist posture — responded by stressing the importance of the country embracing a humanitarian approach overseas. While the country needed to be strong, he said, they also needed to be “good.”

At one point, he appeared to grow emotional when talking about how former President George W. Bush had tried to address the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

“It’s like, that’s who we are, that’s who America is," he said. "We’re going to welcome people around the world who want to come to this great nation.”

