Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) 2016 presidential spokesman slammed Hillary Clinton and members of her campaign staff as the “biggest assholes in American politics” in response to criticism from former Clinton staffers.
“You can see why she’s one of the most disliked politicians in America. She’s not nice. Her people are not nice,” ex-Sanders spox Michael Briggs said in an interview with Politico regarding Clinton. “[Sanders] busted his tail to fly all over the country to talk about why it made sense to elect Hillary Clinton and the thanks that [we] get is this kind of petty stupid sniping a couple years after the fact.”
“It doesn’t make me feel good to feel this way but they’re some of the biggest assholes in American politics,” he added.
In a Monday report, Politico detailed how that after two years since Clinton and Sanders faced off against each other in the Democrat presidential primary, the Vermont Independent’s air travel requests still rub members of Team Hillary the wrong way. According to the news outlet, Sanders’s Gulfstream jet travel costed the Clinton campaign over $100,000. The 77-year-old lawmaker took three multi-day flights during the last two months of the election.
“I’m not shocked that while thousands of volunteers braved the heat and cold to knock on doors until their fingers bled in a desperate effort to stop Donald Trump, his Royal Majesty King Bernie Sanders would only deign to leave his plush DC office or his brand new second home on the lake if he was flown around on a cushy private jet like a billionaire master of the universe,” Zac Petkanas, Clinton’s rapid response director, said.
Arianna Jones, Sanders’s current spokeswoman, dismissed criticism of her boss’s travel habits, saying it would have been difficult to attend campaign events in smaller towns without a charted jet.
“That’s why chartered flights were used: to make sure Sen. Sanders could get to as many locations as quickly as possible in the effort to help the Democratic ticket defeat Donald Trump,” argued Jones.
Sanders’s private jet use is particularly curious as the far-left lawmaker has long warned against the so-called human contributions to climate change, even including elements of the Green New Deal in his 2016 platform.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Ed Markey (D-MA) recently unveiled their version of the Green New Deal — a proposal to “transform” the U.S. economy with a “10-year national mobilization” to shift away from fossil fuels and replace them with renewable energy sources.
Earlier February, Sanders launched a second run for the White House in 2020, vowing to run a campaign on “the principles of economic, social, racial and environmental justice.”