Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday blamed Hillary Clinton for not doing more to stop the Russian attack on the last presidential election.
In an interview with Vermont Public Radio the Vermont Independent was asked why he didn’t warn his supporters leading up to the 2016 presidential election that Russian bots were attempting to sow division between him and Clinton by attacking Clinton on pro-Sanders social media forums.
"I did not know Russian bots were promoting my campaign," Sanders told the outlet. “In the midst of all of this, I was out campaigning very hard for Hillary Clinton. So, let me leave it at that."
But Sanders said a member of his team spoke with the Clinton campaign in September 2016 to warn them of "strange things happening" on social media — and suggested his opponent’s campaign had more information about the nature of the attacks.
"If you and your campaign knew there was Russian meddling and it was trying to sow division, why not take that directly to your supporters?” Sanders was asked.
He shot back that the "real question to be asked" was why didn't the Clinton campaign do something.
"They had more information about this than we did,” he said. “And at this point we were working with them. We knew what we knew, when we knew it. And that’s about all I can say."
Meanwhile, in an interview with Politico, Sanders’s 2016 campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, asserted he’d seen no evidence to support special counsel Robert Mueller's assertion in an indictment last week that the Russian operation had backed Sanders' campaign.
Despite Sanders’s remarks in the public radio interview that his campaign had shared information with the Clinton campaign about suspected Russian anti-Clinton trolls on a campaign Facebook page, Weaver told Politico Sanders had no firsthand knowledge that this had happened.
Asked why Sanders would blame Clinton for not intervening, Weaver said, “Uh, I don’t know. They [Clinton's campaign] did have more information.”
As for Sanders’s claims of having gone to Clinton’s campaign about possible Russian meddling, Weaver said he was “speaking broadly."
“What he knows is all from published news reports,” Weaver said. “The factual underpinning of that in the indictment is what? Zero,” Weaver added.
“I have not seen any evidence of support for Bernie Sanders.”
A former Clinton campaign staffer told Politico it was nonsense that Sanders' campaign had reached out to Clinton's about potential Russian interference.
"No one from the Sanders campaign ever contacted us about this” — not in September, and not in “April and May,” the staffer told Politico.
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