Sen. Bernie Sanders called for his 2020 rival Joe Biden to apologize to one of his campaign’s top aides after she and a Biden surrogate were in a heated exchange on cable news.
Nina Turner, the national co-chairwoman for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, and Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen, who has endorsed Biden for president, engaged in a tense exchange regarding Martin Luther King Jr.’s statements about white centrists on Thursday’s edition of Cuomo Prime Time on CNN.
“[Biden] must accept responsibility for his surrogate telling our campaign co-chair Senator @NinaTurner that she doesn’t have standing to invoke the words of Dr. King,” Sanders tweeted Friday. “That is unacceptable and Joe must apologize to Nina and all the people of color supporting our campaign.”
.@JoeBiden must accept responsibility for his surrogate telling our campaign co-chair Senator @NinaTurner that she doesn’t have standing to invoke the words of Dr. King. That is unacceptable and Joe must apologize to Nina and all the people of color supporting our campaign.
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 6, 2020
During the interview on CNN, Turner invoked MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” noting the reverend said that “the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice,” is the “Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom.”
Rosen protested Turner, who is black, linking MLK’s remarks to Sanders’s platform.
“Nina referenced Dr. Martin Luther King before, saying that he said from the Birmingham jail that we should be concerned about white moderates. That’s actually not what Martin Luther King said,” she said. “What he said was we should be worried about the silence of white moderates.”
Turner responded, “Don’t tell me what kind of standing I have as a black woman in America. How dare you?”
Rosen issued an apology to Turner on social media Friday morning.
2/2 I unequivocally know I disrespected her and I wanted to make it right by telling disgusting white folks to stop. Wow did that tweet go wrong. I am so sorry.
— Hilary Rosen (@hilaryr) March 6, 2020
“I unequivocally know I disrespected her and I wanted to make it right by telling disgusting white folks to stop. Wow did that tweet go wrong. I am so sorry,” she wrote. “I’ve called Nina to apologize directly. Whether or not she takes my call, I am still humbly sorry.”
Sanders apologized to Biden in January for an opinion piece written by one of his campaign supporters that claimed the former vice president has a “big corruption problem, and it makes him a weak candidate.”
