New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie offered one of the campaign's most methodical and specific Republican critiques on Hillary Clinton's record as secretary of state on Tuesday night, swiping Clinton's policy record in several key countries and introducing some new lines of attack.

Although Christie has no foreign policy track record of his own, the former prosecutor delighted Republicans in Cleveland by declaring Clinton "guilty" for a slew of bad judgments and policies.


Here's a rundown of several Christie accusations, and the facts behind them.

Libya: Christie blasted Clinton as "the chief engineer of the disastrous overthrow" of Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi in 2011, an intervention that Christie said had plunged the country into chaos and violence and allowed the Islamic State to take root there. While Christie's description of Libya is undeniable, his "chief engineer" assertion is debatable — President Obama ordered the military intervention that enabled rebel fighters to overthrow (and murder) Qadhafi.

But Clinton was certainly influential in the decision, which she has defended as saving "tens of thousands” of lives threatened by an advance of government troops. Clinton also notes that she came to back an intervention only after an expression of support from the Arab League. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said that, in a closely argued debate, Clinton's position helped to tip the balance, and an internal memo from a top Clinton aide wrote of her "leadership/ownership/stewardship of this country’s Libya policy from start to finish."

Obama has since admitted that the intervention has had negative consequences. Clinton has been less contrite.

Nigeria: Christie said that Clinton "fought" to keep the radical Islamist group Boko Haram off an official State Department terrorism watch list before she left government in 2012. In 2014, the group abducted hundreds of young women and girls who are still missing. Clinton, Christie concluded in perhaps his most explosive allegation, was "an apologist for an Al Qaeda affiliate in Nigeria resulting in the capture of hundreds of young women."

It's true that Clinton opposed designating Boko Haram a Foreign Terrorist Organization, an act that imposes financial sanctions and other legal penalties on named groups and their supporters. While that may be hard to understand — the group already had a clear record of violence and radicalism — she was heeding the advice of numerous regional experts who argued in an open letter that doing so could elevate the group's prestige. The Nigerian government also opposed the designation.

John Kerry did name Boko Haram a terrorist organization after succeeding Clinton in 2013. But the girls were kidnapped the following year, raising the question of whether the designation could have prevented their abduction.

Finally, Christie described Boko Haram as an "Al Qaeda affiliate." It is not clear that the group ever pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda, and the two groups were sometimes described as rivals. (Boko Haram publicly pledged allegiance to ISIL last year.)

Syria: Christie blasted Clinton for having, as he put it "called [Syrian] President [Bashar] Assad as a reformer" and "a different kind of leader." He noted that the Syrian civil war has left 400,000 dead "at the hands of the man Hillary defended," and assailed Clinton as "an awful judge of the character of a dictator and a butcher in the Middle East."

Christie was sloppy on the details of this charge, which has circulated on the right for years. Clinton did not exactly call Assad a reformer. In a March 27, 2011 appearance on CBS's "Face the Nation," at the start of the Syrian uprising, she said: "There is a different leader in Syria now. Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he's a reformer."

As Clinton later noted, she had not called Assad a reformer but was referring to the opinion of others. Republicans have protested that she was clearly endorsing the sentiment, however.

Clinton also did not exactly call Assad a "different kind of leader," as Christie alleged. She called him "a different leader," a factual assertion, in response to a mention by the show's host, Bob Schieffer, of Assad's father, who had killed as many as 250,000 people during a 1982 crackdown against an uprising in the country.

But her implication did seem to be that the younger Assad would not be as brutal as the father. History has proven that assumption very wrong.

Iran: Christie slammed Clinton over the Iran nuclear deal, saying that she had "launched negotiations" with Tehran, "helped cut" the deal, and was "the biggest cheerleader for the agreement in the end." Christie denounced the July 2015 nuclear pact, which he insisted will enable Iran to acquire a bomb in little more than a decade and has left Israel less secure.

Christie's three main assertions about Clinton's role grow less accurate in succession.

It is true that Clinton played an instrumental role in launching the nuclear talks. She met in 2011 with the Sultan of Oman, who has friendly ties with Iran, to discuss opening talks, and the next year, she dispatched two senior State Department officials to begin secret negotiations with Tehran in 2012. But then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry also was passing messages to Iran through the sultan in 2011. And Clinton was acting on a clear mandate to negotiate with Iran from Obama himself.

Clinton aides point out that she was a believer in talks backed by leverage, and was instrumental in winning new economic sanctions and informal embargos against Tehran at the United Nations and among U.S. allies.

Clinton was out of government as the deal was "cut" over about 18 months of official talks between the U.S. and Tehran from November 2013 to July 2015. That work was conducted by Secretary of State John Kerry and his deputies.

What's most debatable is that Clinton was the deal's biggest cheerleader. That honor clearly belonged to Kerry, who secured the deal, and Obama, who ardently defended it against a hostile Congress. Clinton clearly supported the deal, but made clear that she remained highly skeptical of Iran's intentions and acknowledged, more than Obama and Kerry, that the deal involved "risk."

Clinton was well-known in the Obama administration for holding a dimmer view of the prospects for warmer ties with Iran than several other administration officials. Christie is right that she was a critical figure in getting the nuclear talks underway, but even many conservative critics of the deal saw her more as a skeptical backer than the naive cheerleader of Christie's description.

Russia: Christie ridiculed Clinton for initiating the Obama administration's "reset" policy with Russia. He noted that she visited the Kremlin in 2009 and, in an infamous photo-op, handed Russia's foreign minister a toy red "reset" button to symbolize a new beginning of relations after a tense close to the George W. Bush years. Christie called the button "stupid," saying that the reset "deleted in four years the safety and security it took us 40 years to build." Christie said Clinton had declared that "'America’s goal was to strengthen Russia.'" He marveled at the idea of "strengthen[ing] an adversary led by a dictator who dreams of reassembling the old Soviet Empire. What an extraordinarily dangerous lack of judgment."

It is true that Clinton pursued a policy of better relations with Russia at the direction of the Obama White House. And everyone agrees that those relations are now even worse than they were eight years ago. Christie didn’t say why the effort to reset relations with Moscow was a mistake. In 2014, two years after Clinton left government, Russian President Vladimir Putin responded to a political revolution in Ukraine by seizing the country’s Crimean peninsula, and then he backed pro-Russian separatists in the country’s east who many observers say are directed by Moscow.

Hillary Clinton did pursue better relations with Russia and Vladimir Putin. | AP Photo

It’s not clear that a tougher U.S. stance toward Russia during Clinton’s tenure would have deterred Putin from those actions, or from his surprise military intervention in Syria last fall. Clinton advisers note that the thaw in relations brought key benefits, like the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty with Moscow and Russian cooperation in the Iran nuclear negotiations.

Clinton did tell a Russian journalist in a March 19 2010, interview that America’s goal was “to help strengthen Russia.” Here are her full remarks:

"One of the fears that I hear from Russians is that somehow the United States wants Russia to be weak. That could not be farther from the truth. Our goal is to help strengthen Russia. We see Russia with the strong culture, with the incredible intellectual capital that Russia has, as a leader in the 21st century. And we sometimes feel like we believe more in your future than sometimes Russians do.”

Clinton’s point seemed to be about economic strength: She went on to note that 40,000 Russians were then living in Silicon Valley. "We would be thrilled if 40,000 Russians were working in whatever the Russian equivalent of Silicon Valley is, providing global economic competition, taking the Internet and technology to the next level,” she added. At the time, Clinton and Obama believed — as many experts and officials still do — that an economically weak Russia could become dangerously unstable and more aggressive abroad, causing unwelcome new headaches for the U.S.

In the same interview, however, Clinton also seemed to offer not just her hope but a prediction about the future of U.S.-Russian relations. "Honestly, we don’t see Russia as a threat,” she said. "We believe that those days are behind us.” Clinton herself has decisively abandoned that view. Soon after Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, she compared the Russian leader to Adolf Hitler.

But in his attack on Clinton, Christie neglected to mention an inconvenient fact. Donald Trump has repeatedly praised Putin, whom Christie referred to as a “dictator,” and said that he wants to “get along with Russia” as president, in what would be a reset of his own.