Tuesday, April 2, 2019
In the first 41 days of his run for the White House, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) raised $18.2 million, his campaign announced Tuesday.
The money came in the form of nearly 900,000 contributions from 525,000 individual donors, according to campaign manager Faiz Shakir.
"Supporters have shown up big time for this campaign," he told reporters on a campaign conference call. "Huge, you would say."
In addition to the $18.2 million in new contributions, Sanders brought to the race $14 million from other campaign accounts, including his Senate reelection fund and his 2016 presidential campaign kitty. He spent a little over $4 million in his first weeks in the race, leaving him with roughly $28 million cash on hand.
Tags: Senator , Bernie Sanders , fundraising , Faiz Shakir , Jeff Weaver , Kamala Harris , Pete Buttigieg , Web Only , Image
Monday, April 1, 2019
Since U.S. Attorney General William Barr released a four-page memo last week summarizing the work of former special counsel Robert Mueller, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has been demanding the release of Mueller's full findings.
“I don’t want a summary of the report,” Sanders said during a campaign rally in California. “I want the whole damn report, because nobody, especially this president, is above the law.”
Now the Vermont Republican Party is using those words against Sanders.
In a letter sent Sunday to his U.S. Senate office, party chair Deb Billado called on Sanders to "apply this same standard of transparency to yourself." She was referring to a long-running federal investigation of a Burlington College bank loan application made when the senator's wife, Jane O'Meara Sanders, served as president of the since-shuttered institution.
"Under your proposed standard, surely you would agree that all investigative material related to the criminal bank fraud investigation involving you and your wife should be released," Billado wrote the senator.
Tags: Senator , Bernie Sanders , Jane O'Meara Sanders , Deb Billado , Brady Toensing , Burlington College , Web Only , Image
Sunday, March 24, 2019
Updated at 11:39 p.m.
Vermont’s congressional delegation isn’t going to settle for a four-page summary.
Responding Sunday to the release of the topline findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of President Donald Trump, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) called for the public release of Mueller’s full report.
“I don’t want a summary of the report,” Sanders said during a presidential campaign rally in San Francisco. “I want the whole damn report, because nobody, especially this president, is above the law.”
Two days after Mueller closed his 22-month probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, Attorney General William Barr summarized Mueller’s findings in a four-page letter to Congress. According to the AG, Mueller found no evidence that Trump’s campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government to swing the election.
As to whether Trump obstructed justice, Barr wrote that Mueller “did not draw a conclusion — one way or the other." He quoted Mueller as saying that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” Barr added that, after reviewing the report, he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had determined that Trump had not obstructed justice.
Tags: Bernie Sanders , Peter Welch , Patrick Leahy , Robert Mueller , Donald Trump , senator , president , special counsel , Web Only , Image
Tuesday, March 19, 2019
Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) presidential campaign said Tuesday that women now make up 70 percent of its national leadership team. It announced 15 new and newish hires for senior positions, including 10 women and at least four people of color.
The news, first reported by the women's lifestyle site Refinery29, appears aimed at addressing criticism that Sanders' 2016 campaign was too white, too male and too Vermonty. Senior adviser Jeff Weaver — a white, male Vermonter — had been promising for months that the 2020 campaign would be far more diverse. One of Sanders' first hires was campaign manager Faiz Shakir, who has been described as the first Muslim American to hold such a position on a major presidential campaign.
Tags: Senator , Bernie Sanders , presidential campaign , Vermont , Web Only , Image
Friday, March 15, 2019
The Associated Press first reported Thursday that the nonprofit think tank founded by the senator's wife, Jane O'Meara Sanders, and her son, David Driscoll, would stop raising money immediately and close its doors by the end of May. In a press release issued later that evening, the institute said that it was making the move in order to "avoid confusion or even the misperception of any overlap" between the institute and Sanders' presidential campaign.
“We are proud of the work that the Sanders Institute has done to promote progressive solutions to the economic, environmental, racial and social justice challenges that America faces,” Driscoll said in a written statement. “That policy work has always been completely separate from electoral politics. We are taking this step in keeping with that core principle of good governance.”
As a 501c3 nonprofit, the institute is barred from certain lobbying and electoral activities. In an interview with the New York Times, O'Meara Sanders acknowledged that the situation "could become too mushy" if she remained active with the institute while campaigning for her husband.
Tags: Senator , Bernie Sanders , Jane O'Meara Sanders , David Driscoll , Sanders Institute , Our Revolution , Web Only , Image
Thursday, March 14, 2019
It wasn’t their first rodeo. Many of O’Rourke’s key staffers — particularly from his online team — spent the 2016 campaign working for another crowd-pleasing populist: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
At least eight former Sanderistas have decamped to O’Rourke’s campaign, according to online records. Several held top jobs on the Vermonter’s 2016 campaign before joining up with the Texan’s 2018 U.S. Senate race and 2020 presidential run.
“I have friends in both campaigns whose skills and talents I admire, but Bernie’s loss is Beto’s gain,” said Michael Briggs, who served as Sanders’ top spokesman in 2016 and who has not joined a 2020 campaign.
Tags: Senator , Bernie Sanders , Beto O'Rourke , Becky Bond , Zack Malitz , Kenneth Pennington , Elizabeth Bennett , 2020 campaign , Web Only , Image
Wednesday, March 13, 2019
The suit was originally filed on February 18 by a total of 16 state attorneys general. Four more states, including Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Wisconsin, joined the suit Wednesday. It alleges that Trump's February 15 declaration exceeds the power of the executive office, violates the U.S. Constitution and would — by allocating budgeted funds to pay for a border wall — illegally divert federal funds appropriated by Congress for other purposes.
"The president has manufactured a political crisis over the wall," Donovan said, "and wants to divert funds already dedicated [by Congress] to serious public policy ends."
Tags: T.J. Donovan , Donald Trump , Web Only , Image
Monday, March 11, 2019
"Democratic primary voters are very concerned about ensuring that they [nominate] somebody who can defeat Donald Trump," senior adviser Jeff Weaver said Monday in a conference call with reporters. "I think that we have strong indicators from the 2016 race that, in fact, Bernie Sanders is the person who's best positioned to do that."
According to Weaver and campaign pollster Ben Tulchin, Sanders' ability to turn out independents, working-class voters, young people and first-time voters could make the difference in a general-election matchup against the Republican president. Tulchin pointed to the so-called "blue wall" states of Wisconsin and Michigan, which Trump won in 2016, as pickup opportunities for Sanders, were he to win the nomination.
"We believe polling data clearly shows that Bernie's extremely well-positioned to win the Democratic primary and to beat Donald Trump in a general election matchup," Tulchin said.
Tags: Senator , Bernie Sanders , Jeff Weaver , Faiz Shakir , Ben Tulchin , Web Only , Image
Sunday, March 10, 2019
“To the people of New Hampshire, let me say that you helped begin the political revolution in 2016,” he said Sunday afternoon in Concord. “And with your help on this campaign, we are going to complete what we started here.”
Speaking to a crowd of hundreds at the Grappone Conference Center, Sanders recalled that when he first campaigned in New Hampshire in 2015, he’d been “way, way, way behind” in the polls and his ideas had been dismissed as “too radical.” He would go on to win the state’s Democratic primary by more than 22 points.
This time around, Sanders made his New Hampshire debut as a frontrunner. Early polls of the state show him leading every other declared candidate in the field — and holding his own against former vice president Joe Biden, who is considering a run.
More importantly, Sanders argued Sunday, “Those ideas that we talked about when we came here to New Hampshire four years ago … are supported by a majority of the American people and they are being supported by Democratic candidates from school board to president of the United States.”
Tags: Senator , Bernie Sanders , New Hampshire , president , campaign , Donald Trump , Democrats , primary , Image , Web Only
Saturday, March 2, 2019
Confounding media speculation that his current campaign for president would introduce revealing personal elements, the Vermont senator's speech at a Brooklyn College presidential campaign kickoff rally on Saturday consisted largely of themes he's been sounding for the past 40 years.
Sanders did pause 20 minutes into his 35-minute oration to offer “a few personal words.”
He spoke of his Polish immigrant father, a paint salesman “who worked hard his entire life but never made much money.” Most of Eli Sanders' family, the candidate noted, had been “wiped out by Nazi barbarism.”
Sanders also described growing up in a three-and-a-half-room apartment not far from the snow-covered college quadrangle where he was addressing an adoring crowd of about 10,000.
Tags: Senator , Bernie Sanders , Jane O'Meara Sanders , Brooklyn College , Image , Web Only