Thursday’s batch of WikiLeaks emails show Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta and a former Bill Clinton senior adviser discussing “how to stick the knife” into Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary.
In a February 2016 email exchange between John Podesta and Joel Johnson, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, Johnson suggests that Podesta needs to “crush” Bernie Sanders and leave him “ground to a pulp,” in an email with the subject line “Friendly Advice. No Mercy.”
“Bernie needs to be ground to a pulp. We can’t start believing our own primary bullshit. This is no time to run the general. Crush him as hard as you can,” Johnson said in an email in February this year.
Podesta responded by saying that he “agrees with that in principle,” asking Johnson where he would like “to stick the knife in.”
Johnson’s suggestions for crushing Sanders included attacking Sanders as an “Obama betrayer,” “hapless legislator,” “a false promiser,” and pointing out that “he can’t win.”
He also mentions various interest groups that will be receptive to these lines of attack, such as White House officials, senators, policy elites, and black voters.
Wikileaks revelations have also shown that the Clinton campaign also tried tactics such as leaking a photo of Bernie Sanders sunbathing in his swimsuit, whilst emails from the Democratic National Committee have shown how officials actively worked against Sanders in a bid to get Clinton elected.
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