A day before the first Democratic presidential primary debate of the year, Bernie Sanders is accusing Elizabeth Warren of a dirty trick, people close to the Vermont senator’s campaign said.
On Monday, a report emerged detailing a conversation between Sanders and the Massachusetts Democrat. In that 2018 discussion, during which Warren advised Sanders she would run for president, he reportedly told her that he did not believe a woman could win the White House.
And Sanders’s team believes they know exactly who is behind the story: Warren herself.
“They feel betrayed. They had a detente,” a source in regular contact with the Sanders campaign told the Washington Examiner, adding only the senators were privy to the conversation.
Another individual close to his campaign claimed Warren had been shopping the story around for some time.
Allegations of sexism rocked the Sanders campaign in 2016, with fans of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accusing his supporters of misogyny throughout the primary.
Sanders denied the claims on Monday, chalking them up to “staff who weren’t in the room (and) are lying about what happened.”
An aide to a rival campaign said that if allegations Warren had a hand in farming out the story were true, it would appear to come straight from “the Warren playbook.”
Tensions between Sanders and Warren spiked over the weekend after a leaked campaign memo revealed the Sanders campaign had been questioning whether Warren would appeal to a broad Democratic base because only “highly educated, more affluent people” liked her.
Warren, with whom Sanders had a nonaggression pact, hit back at her Senate colleague for “sending his volunteers out to trash me.”
Sanders, however, distanced himself from any personal involvement.
“We have over 500 people on our campaign. People do certain things. I’m sure that in Elizabeth’s campaign, people do certain things as well,” he said.
On Saturday, the Washington Examiner reported that Sanders supporters felt no hostility toward the Warren camp, even if they believed they were competing for the same voters.
The pair, who are populist kindred spirits, had teamed up in prior debates to defend liberal policies, such as “Medicare for all.” Yet that ceasefire could be over as they prepare to join four other candidates on stage in Des Moines on Tuesday.
