Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign denies having any role in the surfacing of allegations that Joe Biden inappropriately touched women as the former vice president leans into a 2020 run for the White House.
The denial comes as Biden’s camp speculates the accusations are being pushed by opposing Democratic campaigns as Biden leads by significant margins in most Democratic primary polls.
Lucy Flores, a former Nevada assemblywoman, accused Biden on Friday of touching her inappropriately and kissing her on the back of the head at a campaign rally in 2014. Flores endorsed Sanders, I-Vt., in the Democratic presidential primaries in 2016 and became a campaign surrogate. She has not endorsed a candidate in the 2020 cycle but attended former Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s kickoff rally in El Paso on Saturday.
One Democratic source told the Daily Beast that people in Biden’s orbit think the allegations were “all coming out of Bernie world.”
In a statement sent to the Washington Examiner, Sanders’ campaign manager Faiz Shakir said claims that the team is behind the allegations made his “blood boil.”
“Neither the Bernie Sanders campaign nor anyone involved in it, planted, planned, persuaded, cajoled, or otherwise urged Lucy Flores or anyone else to tell their story. Full stop, period, end of sentence. I don’t want to hear it. We didn’t play a role,” Shakir said.
“But this is why my blood boils,” he said. “We have heard through innuendo and rumors that somehow this campaign was involved in Lucy Flores telling her story and it is deeply disrespectful and shameful that any time a woman comes forward to tell her story there has to be some kind of intimation or suggestion that that person is doing so out of some political agenda and or that the person may be lying … It is shameful. We went through the Donald Trump campaign in which a number of women came forward to tell their stories and they were dismissed and criticized and ripped by the president of the United States on the highest stage of the land. We saw it with Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, that she must be a Dianne Feinstein plant. It is dismissive and disrespectful that whenever a woman comes forward the first suggestion is that there has to be a political agenda driving them.”
Since Flores went public, three other women have also alleged Biden touched them inappropriately.
Neither Sanders’ campaign or Biden’s spokesman immediately returned a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.
