Angie Morelli, a delegate to the Democratic National Convention for Sen. Bernie Sanders and a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, lit into Hillary Clinton — Sanders’ chief rival for the Democratic nomination — over her shoddy record on women’s rights as it relates to her husband’s sex scandals.
Specifically, Morelli told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview inside “Bernie’s Diner” that Hillary Clinton’s public persona of being pro-women does not hold up under scrutiny after what she did to the various women who have alleged that her husband former U.S. President Bill Clinton sexually assaulted and raped them.
Hillary Clinton, Morelli told Breitbart News, “has had a very colorful background with her support of women’s rights.”
“I specifically have a really big issue with how she handled the scandals of what was going on when he [Bill Clinton] was president,” Morelli said. “What I understand about that it is exactly how you would not have wanted to handle those situations.”
Morelli’s comments came in an exclusive interview inside a famous now-defunct diner normally called “Johnie’s” in Los Angeles. It was famously used in films like The Big Lebowski, but has been transformed into a Sanders volunteer headquarters. Morelli, a Sanders delegate from Nevada to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July, has come down to California to help her candidate in the final week-plus ahead of what’s become Sanders’s last stand: The Battle of California.
“I don’t see how she could have handled these things that way and also come out and say, aw, I am a protector of women’s rights,’” Morelli said. “It’s like, no you are not, you were specifically tearing down these women who were saying they felt wronged in one way or another, and you are telling them to shut up and you are also dragging them through the mud in the media. That’s not what I want, I don’t want someone like that representing me, and certainly don’t want some one like that saying represent women’s rights, because that is not what she is doing.”
A number of women, including Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, and more, have alleged that Bill Clinton engaged in inappropriate behavior towards them. It has also been alleged by many of those women that Hillary Clinton engaged in efforts to intimidate them into silence after Bill Clinton’s alleged transgressions.
Media figures and Clinton allies for years have argued that those scandals do not affect the public perception of the Clinton family, and NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell has dismissed the allegations as old news and as “discredited,” not worthy of follow-up. Most in the media, and allies of the Clintons throughout the Democratic Party, have scoffed at presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s decision to force this issue back into the mainstream political discussion.
But it appears to be paying dividends, as now the unlikeliest of allies — as far on the left as they come in Morelli — is laying the wood to the Clintons even harder than Trump could. Morelli represents a strain of disaffected Democrats who can’t find solace in ever supporting the Clintons—but also find it hard looking to Republicans, even Trump, for leadership.
When asked if she thought that women should support Hillary Clinton just because she is a woman, Morelli responded very passionately in an interview with Breitbart News.
“I think that us a ridiculous sentiment,” Morelli said. “I am a woman and I have been accused of being a feminist from one time or another, and I think suggesting that we support her just because she is a woman is an anathema to the whole point of having equality. It is no longer making her equal, it is making her some shinny new object that we should just vote for because she has a different chromosome then everybody else, and that exactly what we should not be doing. That is not a conversation we should be having. That is not propping women up, that’s saying, ‘hey, you are good for a girl, and that is not okay.’”
Morelli is the type of Democrat that Clinton is going to have serious trouble wooing into her camp if and when she does finally finish off Sanders and wrap up the Democratic nomination. That Morelli is openly criticizing the Clintons over the sex scandals—as Sanders himself finally starts criticizing Clinton over her private email server scandal in the wake of a devastating Inspector General report from the State Department’s internal watchdog—is a sign that Hillary Clinton is far from out of the woods yet with her own internal party battles.
But just because Clinton is having a tough time winning over these voters—who normally fall in line right behind the Democratic nominee—does not mean it will be any easier for Trump. Morelli, who was in boot camp for the U.S. Marine Corps back during 9/11 in 2001, became an anti-war protester upon her discharge from the military years later. That, she told Breitbart News, did not sit well with her fellow veterans.
“That’s when the budding heads started,” she said. She would frequently get emails from her fellow Marines, telling her “they disagreed with everything she was saying, but the respected her passion… Go Morelli.”
But as she transitioned from being an anti-war protester to being a Sanders campaign supporter, her Marine buddies began to come around. Instead of getting the emails saying they disagreed with her, she now gets emails telling her that Sanders is coming to their town. When she gets emails like that, she very passionately responds and encourages them to go to the rally. “Just go to his rally, just go to one of his rallies, just go to one of them! Look up his stuff on Veterans!”
Morelli has even been able to convert some of her fellow Marines into Sanders supporters, she told Breitbart News. “I have gotten a lot of them who will text me and tell me ‘I got my Bernie button.’”
Morelli feels that Sanders’ record on veterans speaks for itself, as he serves on the Senate’s Veterans Affairs Committee. “He is the best of anyone else who has ever ran, unless they were in the military,” Morelli says she tells people on the stump for Sanders.
Morelli, however, disagrees significantly with Trump’s positions on veterans. “I think that everyone thinks that,” she replied when asked if she agreed with Trump’s belief that veterans need to be helped more than they are currently being helped.
“He [Trump] is the most vocal about it but at the same time he is the worst out of all of them,” Morelli said of Trump’s veterans plans. “He keeps having all of these fake veterans’ events. There was a marine who had just had a protest against Trump in New York. Trump lies about supporting the veterans, which is worse than doing nothing. Don’t count me and say you are doing us any favors, when you are the one who is taking money out of our pockets. He is the worst.”
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