Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on Tuesday refused to defend himself from attacks lodged by former challenger Hillary Clinton, stating that he is wholly focused on the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump.
Clinton trashed Sanders, her former primary opponent, in the upcoming documentary of her life on Hulu and in a Monday interview with the Hollywood Reporter, as Breitbart News reported.
“He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done,” Clinton said in the documentary.
“He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it,” she added.
Sanders, who has an established pattern of refusing to defend himself from colleagues who go after him, failed to condemn Clinton’s remarks.
“My focus today is on a monumental moment in American history: the impeachment trial of Donald Trump,” Sanders said in a statement, according to Politico’s Holly Otterbein.
“Together, we are going to go forward and defeat the most dangerous president in American history,” he said.
Sanders also brushed off Clinton’s remarks with a joke, according to NBC News’s Geoff Bennett, telling him, “On a good day, my wife likes me, so let’s clear the air on that one”:
Sanders refrained from attacking Clinton in 2016 and ultimately endorsed her bid amid the purported wrongdoings committed by her campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
Similarly, Sanders has failed to defend himself and the members of his current campaign. He apologized to Joe Biden (D) on Monday over an op-ed penned by Sanders surrogate Zephyr Teachout, who proclaimed that the former vice president has “a big corruption problem.”
“It is absolutely not my view that Joe is corrupt in any way,” Sanders told CBS News. “And I’m sorry that that op-ed appeared.”
Sanders has also denied that Democrat leaders are “rigging” the primary against him — accusations which boiled over after the latest Democrat debate.
“Let’s be clear about who is rigging what: it is Donald Trump’s action to use the power of the federal government for his own political benefit that is the cause of the impeachment trial,” Sanders said in a statement last week.
“His transparent attempts to divide Democrat will not work, and we are going to unite to sweep him out of the White House in November,” he added.