lot of admiration for Hillary Clinton, but she clearly is not trustworthy,” Fiorina said, after confirming her plans to seek the presidency. She went after Clinton by name when asked, citing what she called a lack of transparency on a number of fronts, including the 2012 attack on an American embassy in Benghazi, Libya, Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state, and foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation.
Carson also got ahead of himself on Sunday, confirming his plans to run in an interview that aired on an Ohio television station.
Carson, 63, is scheduled to make his formal announcement in a speech from his native Detroit.
Raised in Detroit by a single mother, Carson practiced medicine and served as the head of pediatric neurosurgery for close to three decades at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. He gained national renown in conservative politics after condemning Obama’s healthcare law at a high-profile Washington event in 2013.
He has established a strong base of vocal support among the conservative tea-party movement, some of whom launched an effort to push Carson into the race before he set up an exploratory committee earlier this year.
Yet he has stumbled at times. He has suggested Obamacare is the worst thing since slavery, compared present-day America to Nazi Germany, and called problems at the nation’s Veterans Affairs hospitals “a gift from God” because they revealed holes in country’s effort to care for former members of the military.
Fiorina, meanwhile, has a resume more likely to draw support among the Republican establishment. The former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard Co., she became a prominent figure in Republican politics in 2010, when she ran for Senate in California and lost to incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer.
In the past several months, she has emerged as a fierce critic of Clinton, whose potential to become America’s first female president is a centerpiece of her political brand.