Bernie Sanders: Bill Clinton’s Affair with Monica Was ‘Disgraceful’

Democratic presidential challenger Sen. Bernie Sanders blasted Bill Clinton’s extramarital affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky during a campaign stop in Iowa Friday.

“Look, Hillary Clinton is not Bill Clinton. What Bill Clinton did, I think we can all acknowledge was totally, totally, totally disgraceful and unacceptable,” Sanders said at a town hall in the first-in-the-nation caucus state. “But I am running against Hillary Clinton. I’m not running against Bill Clinton.”

As he did with Hillary Clinton’s private email scandal in a Las Vegas debate, Sanders dismissed the Lewinsky controversy, even after he explicitly referenced it.

“So what I am doing is contrasting my record with Hillary Clinton’s record, and they are very, very different records,” Sanders continued. “But I am not gonna get into the personal stuff. You’re looking at somebody who in a long political career—and you call up your friends in Vermont to verify this—I’ve never run a negative TV ad in my life.”

Despite going dirty on the stump, Sanders recently slammed Republican Donald Trump for raising the specter of Bill Clinton’s womanizing ways, saying that Trump should focus on policy.

“Maybe Trump should worry about those issues rather than Bill Clinton’s sex life,” Sanders said in a Sunday show appearance.

In 1972, Sanders wrote and published an essay in which he described his view that women fantasize about being raped.

“A man goes home and masturbates his typical fantasy. A woman on her knees. A woman tied up. A woman abused,” Sanders wrote. “A woman enjoys intercourse with her man—as she fantasizes about being raped by 3 men simultaneously.”