Paperback version of Clinton's 'Hard Choices’ omits her former TPP trade pact support

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The paperback version of Hillary Clinton’s memoir “Hard Choices” fails to include her support of the international trade pact TPP that rivals Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have opposed, raising criticism about Clinton “reinventing herself” for the general election race.

The paperback version of Clinton’s 2014 book, which details her work as secretary of state for President Obama, omits the passage in which she touts her efforts to get the country to support the 12-nation trade deal, which she once referred to as the “gold standard” for such agreements.

“We worked hard to improve and ratify trade agreements with Colombia and Panama and encouraged Canada and the group of countries that became known as the Pacific Alliance -- Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Chile -- all open-market democracies driving toward a more prosperous future to join negotiations with Asian nations on TPP, the trans-Pacific trade agreement,” Clinton says in the hardback version about a 2009 effort.

However, Clinton changed her position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership in October 2015, about a month after the deal was signed and after weeks of being pressed by the news media for an answer.

A total 96 pages were trimmed from the hardback version. Publisher Simon & Schuster said a “limited number of sections” were cut to “accommodate a shorter length for this edition," according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, which reported on the changes shortly after the paperback edition was released in April.

“That Clinton's own memoir is reinventing itself for the general election shows the lengths she will go to mislead the American people," Republican National Committee spokesman Michael Short told DailyMail.com, which along with The International Business Times earlier this week picked up on the changes and reported them.

The Clinton campaign declined Saturday to comment.

The Obama administration says TPP attempts to help American entrepreneurs, farmers and small business owners sell products on the international market by eliminating roughly 18,000 taxes and others “trade barriers” that “put American products at an unfair disadvantage.”

Democratic primary candidate Sen. Bernie Sander has said the deal and its accompanying Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership are “disastrous” and need to be renegotiated -- in large part because of their potential to kill millions of U.S. jobs and negative environmental impact.

Clinton, now the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, also supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed by husband President Bill Clinton in the 1990s and criticized by Trump, the GOP’s presumptive nominee.

Trump, a billionaire businessman, says he supports free trade but has been highly critical of the TPP, calling it a “horrible deal” in part because, he argues, it continues to allow such countries as China to continue “currency manipulation.”

“This is one of the worst trade deals,” Trump said during the Fox Business Channel/ Wall Street Journal debate in November 2015. “I’d rather make individual deals with individual countries. We will do much better. ... We’re losing now over $500 billion in terms of imbalance with China.”