Bernie blames Hillary for allowing Russian interference
The senator and his top political adviser also denied Mueller's assertion that Russian actors backed his campaign.
By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE 02/21/2018 06:45 PM EST Updated 02/21/2018 09:48 PM EST
Sen. Bernie Sanders said that he did not benefit from Russian bots urging voters to support him.
Bernie Sanders on Wednesday blamed Hillary Clinton for not doing more to stop the Russian attack on the last presidential election. Then his 2016 campaign manager, in an interview with POLITICO, said he’s seen no evidence to support special counsel Robert Mueller's assertion in an indictment last week that the Russian operation had backed Sanders' campaign.
The remarks showed Sanders, running for a third term and currently considered a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, deeply defensive in response to questions posed to him about what was laid out in the indictment. He attempted to thread a response that blasts Donald Trump for refusing to acknowledge that Russians helped his campaign — but then holds himself harmless for a nearly identical denial.
In doing so, Sanders and his former campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, presented a series of self-serving statements that were not accurate, and that track with efforts by Trump and his supporters to undermine the credibility of the Mueller probe.
“The real question to be asked is what was the Clinton campaign [doing about Russian interference]? They had more information about this than we did,” Sanders said in the interview with Vermont Public Radio.
After being contacted by POLITICO about the interview, Sanders issued a lengthy statement calling the Russian involvement a “direct assault on the free democratic systems that stand in contrast to the autocratic, nationalistic kleptocracy of Vladimir Putin and his backers in the Russian oligarchy” which “deserves unconditional condemnation.”
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He said that goes for “any candidate or active opposition to any candidate,” and listed most other candidates and campaigns whose support by Russians was detailed in the indictment — including "my own."
Sanders said that his campaign had shared information with the Clinton campaign about suspected Russian anti-Clinton trolls on a campaign Facebook page. But Weaver later acknowledged that the Vermont senator had no firsthand knowledge that this had happened. Weaver said Sanders based his remark on an article published by NBC’s San Diego affiliate over the weekend about a campaign volunteer who claimed to have conducted his own investigation and brought the findings to the Clinton campaign in September — an assertion flatly denied by a former Clinton campaign aide.
"A guy who was on my staff … checked it out and he went to the Clinton campaign, and he said, ‘You know what? I think these guys are Russians,’” Sanders said. Weaver said Sanders had not verified the information in the article himself before stating it as fact.
The Sanders statement issued late Wednesday attributed to “an aide to Sen. Sanders” added “he was using the word ‘campaign’ expansively to include not only the formal, institutional campaign, but also the broader network of volunteers and supporters of Bernie 2016 across the country.”
Sanders went on to indicate that he was at least vaguely aware of the operation that Mueller detailed in his indictment of 13 Russian nationals last week: “What Mueller reported, he had more specificity than we’d seen before. Not exactly new.”
A former Clinton campaign staffer said it was nonsense that Sanders' campaign had reached out to Clinton's about potential Russian interference. "No one from the Sanders campaign ever contacted us about this” — not in September, and not in “April and May.” Sanders said in the radio interview that he noticed "lots of strange things" during those months in 2016.
“They were supporting my campaign? No. They were attacking Hillary Clinton’s campaign and using my supporters against Hillary Clinton,” Sanders said in the radio interview.