Carly Fiorina mocked fellow GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump on Tuesday night for meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in "a green room before a show," implying that the reality TV host is not serious when it comes to foreign policy.
During the Fox Business Network GOP debate, Trump said he and Putin "were stablemates on '60 Minutes' and that went pretty well," referring to the fact that their interviews aired the same night on the CBS show.
"I have met him as well, not in a green room for a show, but in a private meeting," Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, replied. "One of the reasons I've said I wouldn't be talking to Vladimir Putin right now is because we are speaking to him from a position of weakness, brought on by this administration. So I wouldn't talk to him for a while."
Fiorina, however, also met Putin in a green room, although it was before a speech at a conference rather than an appearance on a TV show. In fact, Fiorina herself has described their 2001 meeting using the exact phrase "green room."
"I met him in Beijing. We were in sort of a green room setting, actually," Fiorina said during a September appearance on "The Tonight Show." "The two of us were giving a speech -- each of us were giving a speech at a major economic conference called APEC -- and so the two of us were sitting sort of in a chair like this, about this close, for 45 minutes before his speech and before mine. I would describe him as a formidable adversary."
And the fact that Fiorina and Putin were thrown together in the green room didn't seem deliberate, at least on the part of Fiorina.
"I keep wondering how it is that I got positioned to speak in the slot before the president of the Russian Federation -- on the subject of change, no less," the GOP presidential candidate admitted during a speech in South Carolina in May.
See the latest updates on the GOP debate here.
Also on HuffPost:
