A conservative group is criticizing Bush for choosing Clinton to receive the award. | AP Photos Jeb Bush to present award to Clinton

Possible 2016 Republican contender Jeb Bush is presenting Hillary Clinton, the presumptive front runner for the 2016 Democratic nomination, with an award Tuesday, Sept. 10 in Philadelphia — and it has one conservative group criticizing the ceremony.

Bush, the chairman of the National Constitution Center, is presenting Clinton with the organization’s 2013 Liberty Medal.


“Former Secretary Clinton has dedicated her life to serving and engaging people across the world in democracy,” Bush said in a statement released earlier this summer. “These efforts as a citizen, an activist, and a leader have earned Secretary Clinton this year’s Liberty Medal.”

The Independence Hall Tea Party Association sent out an email about the ceremony on Monday, calling it “extremely distressing.” A newly formed group, the Independence Hall Foundation, will hold a press conference on the day Clinton is receiving the medal denouncing her selection and offering an alternative award. Don Adams, an organizer of the Independence Hall Foundation, said in an email to POLITICO that the groups mission is to “seek to promote the ideals of the United States as embodied in its founding documents—the Declaration of Independence, the U. S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. We recognize and honor Independence Hall as the physical and symbolic foundation of the American nation.”

Adams said the timing of the Liberty Medal presentation, on the eve of the anniversary of the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, “couldn’t be worse.”

“To give her a liberty medal on the eve of the Benghazi attack is an affront to the victims, it’s an affront to the American people. Frankly, it’s a sheer disgrace,” Adams told POLITICO.

Adams also said it was “a bit unseemly” that Bush will be the one to present the medal to Clinton.

Former recipients of the Liberty Medal include former Presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush in 2006, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 2008 and former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in 2011, according to a release from the National Constitution Center.