Bernie Sanders isn’t surprised that members of Hillary Clinton’s campaign trash-talked him and his supporters in private, hacked emails which were published by WikiLeaks.
“Trust me, if they went into our emails—I suppose which may happen, who knows—I’m sure there would be statements that would be less than flattering about, you know, the Clinton staff,” Sanders told the Washington Post on Monday. “That’s what happens in campaigns.”
Despite stolen emails showing top Clinton staff calling Sanders a “doofus” and calling supporters of a $15 minimum wage—which Sanders has advocated for vocally—“the Red Army,” the Vermont senator has continued to campaign heavily for Clinton nationwide, calling Trump the most dangerous major-party candidate in modern American history and promising that his more liberal supporters will hold Clinton accountable.
His job, he told the Post in an article published separately, would be “to demand that the Democratic Party implement” its platform.
Still, Sanders was quick to point out the differences between his presidential campaign, which advertised its boot-strap, grassroots appeal throughout his candidacy, and Clinton’s, whose staff numbers in the hundreds.
“We did not have a committee deciding what kind of jokes I would be telling. In fact, we usually had me scrambling to write my speech on a yellow piece of paper, which I finished three minutes before I would go up there,” Sanders told the Post. “So, you know, they were much more prepared and much better organized and careful about what they were saying or not saying.”
Sanders also noted that the emails published by WikiLeaks have confirmed his suspicions of the Democratic National Committee’s favoritism towards Clinton.
“It’s amusing,” he said. “We said that the Clinton campaign was heavily influencing what the DNC was doing regarding debates, and that’s exactly what had been happening. None of that is a shock to me. Was I shocked to find out that the DNC was partial toward Clinton? Not exactly. That’s something we knew from day one.”
