Former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said he is voting for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. Chertoff to vote for Clinton over 'hysterical' Trump

Former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, once the lead Republican lawyer on the Senate committee investigating Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Whitewater scandal, will vote for the former secretary of state for president this fall.

Chertoff told Bloomberg that his decision to support Clinton over Donald Trump came down to the former’s stronger stance on national security issues and the latter’s inability to control his impulses. That he and the Democratic nominee have a history of conflict dating back to the 1990s pales in comparison to the threat Chertoff said Trump poses to American security.


"I realized we spent a huge amount of time in the '90s on issues that were much less important than what was brewing in terms of terrorism," Chertoff told Bloomberg, adding that Clinton "has good judgment and a strategic vision how to deal with the threats that face us."

"People can go back decades and perhaps criticize some of the judgments that were made," Chertoff added. "That is very, very insignificant compared to the fundamental issue of how to protect the country."

While it was Chertoff who investigated the Clintons in the 1990s, it was Clinton who did the antagonizing during her tenure in the Senate. The former New York senator was twice the lone vote opposing Chertoff’s confirmation, first in 2001 to head the Justice Department’s criminal division and later in 2003 when he was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals. She voted to confirm him in 2005 as the country’s second secretary of homeland security, and in that role Chertoff said Clinton was “clear eyed and tough on national security issues."

Trump, by comparison, showed Chertoff at last week’s presidential debate that he lacks the temperament to be commander in chief. His decision to spend last week attacking former Miss Universe winner Alicia Machado, a woman Trump once called “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping,” proved to the former homeland security secretary that the Manhattan billionaire is too impulsive to be president.

"This issue came up at the debate about Miss Universe," he said. "Not only did he seem at the debate to lose his temper, but to get up at 3:30 a.m. and reach for your smartphone is to me a hysterical reaction. If you're president, the button you reach for is not the Twitter button; it's the nuclear button."