Rep. Tulsi Gabbard weighed in on reports that fellow 2020 Democrat Sen. Bernie Sanders told Sen. Elizabeth Warren that a woman can’t win the presidency by recalling her own meeting with the Vermont senator before she jumped in the race.
“I also met with @BernieSanders before announcing my candidacy. We had a nice one-on-one conversation and I informed him that I would be running for President,” the Hawaii Democrat tweeted Monday night. “In that meeting, he showed me the greatest respect and encouragement, just as he always has.”
I also met with @BernieSanders before announcing my candidacy. We had a nice one-on-one conversation and I informed him that I would be running for President. In that meeting, he showed me the greatest respect and encouragement, just as he always has.
— Tulsi Gabbard ? (@TulsiGabbard) January 14, 2020
Gabbard’s tweet followed a daylong controversy over reports that Sanders told Warren “he does not believe that a woman can win” the Oval Office during a private meeting between the two in 2018. Warren did not initially comment on the story, but Sanders, 78, quickly disputed the claim, calling it “ludicrous.”
“It’s sad that three weeks before the Iowa caucus and a year after that private conversation, staff who weren’t in the room are lying about what happened,” he said in a statement.
Warren, 70, broke her silence on the rumor Monday evening in a statement backing up the claim.
“Bernie and I met for more than two hours in December 2018 to discuss the 2020 election, our past work together, and our shared goals: beating Donald Trump, taking back our government from the wealthy and well-connected, and building an economy that works for everyone,” she said. “Among the topics that came up was what would happen if Democrats nominated a female candidate. I thought a woman could win; he disagreed.”
Those close to the Sanders campaign suspected that Warren’s team or even the candidate herself planted the story during an escalation of a feud between the pair after a leaked internal memo from Sanders’s team revealed over the weekend that he instructed volunteers to attack Warren for having an “affluent” voter base.
Warren hit back, saying she was “disappointed to hear that Bernie is sending his volunteers out to trash me,” and Sanders later distanced himself from the volunteer campaign script, calling it a “media blow up.”
Aside from the latest back-and-forths, the liberal presidential candidates, who normally team up to defend their leftist policies from criticism by more center-left rivals, had been operating under an apparent nonaggression pact.
