Speaking to Hollywood Reporter in a recent interview, Clinton, the former Secretary of State who lost the 2016 presidential election to Trump, did not hold back in her criticism of Sanders, accusing the 2020 Democratic hopeful of fostering a toxic culture within his campaign.
Asked during the interview about comments she makes in a four-part Hulu series titled Hillary, which is set to premier at Sundance, Clinton stood behind her comments that “nobody wants to work” Sanders.
“In the doc, you’re brutally honest on Sanders: ‘He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.’ That assessment still hold?” Hollywood Reporter TV editor Lacey Rose asked.
“Yes, it does,” Clinton responded, plainly.
Asked whether she would support the Vermont senator if he wins the Democratic nomination for the 2020 race, the former Secretary of State remained reticent, saying she’s “not going to go there yet.”
“We’re still in a very vigorous primary season,” she said.
However, Clinton said, the problem with Sanders, who ultimately endorsed the former Secretary of State in the 2016 election race after running against her for the Democratic nomination, was not just the senator himself, but his “leadership team” in general.
“It’s not only him, it’s the culture around him. It’s his leadership team. It’s his prominent supporters. It’s his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women,” Clinton said. “And I really hope people are paying attention to that because it should be worrisome that he has permitted this culture — not only permitted, [he] seems to really be very much supporting it.”
“And I don’t think we want to go down that road again where you campaign by insult and attack and maybe you try to get some distance from it, but you either don’t know what your campaign and supporters are doing or you’re just giving them a wink and you want them to go after Kamala [Harris] or after Elizabeth [Warren],” Clinton continued. “I think that that’s a pattern that people should take into account when they make their decisions.”
For Clinton, allegations, which Sanders has denied, of the Vermont senator telling his Massachusetts counterpart, Warren, that he did not think a woman could win the federal election in 2018, are also part of that pattern.
“Well, number one, I think [that sentiment] is untrue, which we should all say loudly,” Clinton said. " I mean, I did get more votes both in the primary, by about 4 million, and in the general election, by about 3 million."
“I think that both the press and the public have to really hold everybody running accountable for what they say and what their campaign says and does,” she continued. “That’s particularly true with what’s going on right now with the Bernie campaign having gone after Elizabeth with a very personal attack on her.”
“Then this argument about whether or not or when he did or didn’t say that a woman couldn’t be elected, it’s part of a pattern. If it were a one-off, you might say, ‘OK, fine.’ But he said I was unqualified,” Clinton said. “I had a lot more experience than he did, and got a lot more done than he had, but that was his attack on me.”
“I just think people need to pay attention because we want, hopefully, to elect a president who’s going to try to bring us together, and not either turn a blind eye, or actually reward the kind of insulting, attacking, demeaning, degrading behavior that we’ve seen from this current administration,” Clinton warned.
The 2016 presidential candidate said she had already talked to “practically everybody who had run and is still running” in the 2020 election and had warned women candidates: “Look, you can run the best campaign, but you’re going to have to be even better than your best campaign to overcome some of the unfairness that will be directed at you as a woman.”
Unsurprisingly, by “practically everybody,” Clinton did not appear to include Sanders, with the former Secretary of State saying she couldn’t say she spoke to “all” candidates when asked if she had also spoken with the Vermont senator.