President Obama's campaign is using Bill Clinton to argue Mitt Romney would not have launched the raid to capture Osama bin Laden last year.
The argument is being made to coincide with the one-year anniversary of bin Laden's death.
In extended, previously unreleased footage taken from an interview with the former president for the 17-minute pro-Obama film "The Road We've Traveled," the campaign suggests that the presumptive GOP nominee would not have ordered the mission to kill bin Laden.
“[Obama] took the harder, and the more honorable path,” Clinton said in the interview, describing the behind-the-scenes process that went into the decision to okay the raid. "He had to decide. And that's what you hire the president to do. You hire the president to make the calls when no one else can do it."
"The commander-in-chief gets one chance to make the right decision," reads the text in the video. It goes on to ask: "What path would Mitt Romney have taken?"
The campaign suggests Romney would not have ordered the raid by pointing to a 2007 interview with The Associated Press in which Romney said: "It's not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person."
Vice President Biden also attacked Romney this week on the same issue.
"I think nothing speaks more powerfully to the differences between President Obama and Governor Romney than one of the defining moments in the past four years, the hunt for Osama bin Laden," Biden said Thursday at a campaign event in New York City.
He quoted Obama's pledge as a candidate to making crushing al Qaeda "our biggest national security priority.”
Biden added, "I was a little bit more direct. I said, we’d follow the S.O.B. to the gates of Hell if we had to."
The al Queda leader was killed last year in Pakistan as the result of a Navy SEAL raid on May 1. At the time of the raid, Romney congratulated Obama, the military and the intelligence community for "an extraordinary accomplishment.” He called it an "American" accomplishment as well, as opposed to a political victory.
"It's now sad to see the Obama campaign seek to use an event that unified our country to once again divide us, in order to try to distract voters' attention from the failures of his administration," Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in a response to the new video. "With 23 million Americans struggling for work, our national debt soaring, and household budgets being squeezed like never before, Mitt Romney is focused on strengthening America at home and abroad."
Clinton's interview serves to underscore the moment as a defining accomplishment in Obama's first term.
"Suppose [the SEAL team had] been captured or killed. The downside would have been horrible for [Obama]. But he reasoned: I cannot in good conscience do nothing," the former president continued in the clip. “When I saw what had happened, I thought to myself, ‘I hope that’s the call I would’ve made.’ ”
This report was updated at 9:44 a.m.
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