A4 eZ re the washington post.monday, february 24 , 2020
the blame on Schiff. In an appear-
ance on “fox News Sunday,” Short
argued that the California Demo-
crat’s committee was “selectively
leaking out information and often
distorting information.”
That claim prompted a swift
pushback from host Chris Wallace,
who asked Short: “I don’t under-
stand, you’re saying it’s not true
and they leaked it?”
Sh ort demurred, saying only
that “that was a classified briefing
that shouldn’t have been dis-
cussed.”
[email protected]ellen nakashima and shane harris
contributed to this report.he had not been briefed about any
russian interference efforts. He
blamed Schiff and said there
should be an investigation into the
source of the leak.
Schiff responded w ith a tweet in
which he addressed the president
directly, accusing him of “deflec-
tion” and telling him: “Your false
claims fool no one.”
“You welcomed russian help in
2016, tried to coerce Ukraine’s h elp
in 2019, and won’t p rotect our elec-
tions in 2020,” Schiff said. “Now
you fired your intel chief for brief-
ing Congress about it. You’ve be-
trayed America. Again.”
marc Short, chief of staff to Vice
President Pence, also sought to pinwho led a lengthy investigation
into russian efforts to interfere in
the 2016 campaign, should be dis-
patched to investigate the claims
that russia is seeking to help Sand-
ers win the Democratic nomina-
tion.
“A re any Democrat operatives,
the DNC, or Crooked Hillary Clin-
ton, blaming russia, russia, rus-
sia for the Bernie Sanders win in
Nevada,” Trump said. “If so I sug-
gest calling Bob mueller & the 13
Angry Democrats to do a new mu-
eller report, Democrat Edition.
Bob w ill get to the bottom of it!”
Trump maintained in an ex-
change with reporters outside the
White House earlier Sunday thatother intelligence official that they
were being “played,” a senior White
House official told The Washing-
ton Post. Trump later announced
that he was replacing maguire with
a vocal loyalist, richard Grenell,
the U.S. ambassador to Germany.
During the briefing, Pierson also
described other steps russia is tak-
ing, including assistance to the
presidential campaign of Sen. Ber-
nie Sanders (I-Vt.), according to
people familiar with the matter,
speaking on the condition of ano-
nymity to discuss sensitive intelli-
gence.
In a nother tweet Sunday, Trump
jokingly suggested that former spe-
cial counsel robert S. mueller III,“Someday he will be caught, & that
will be a very unpleasant experi-
ence!”
Trump’s tweet comes more than
a week after the intelligence offi-
cial, Shelby Pierson, told members
of Schiff’s committee during a bi-
partisan briefing that russia has
“developed a preference” for
Trump and views his administra-
tion as more favorable to its inter-
ests, according to people who were
briefed on the comments and
spoke on the condition of anonym-
ity to discuss a sensitive matter.
Trump became angry after
learning of Pierson’s remarks and
told acting director of national in-
telligence Joseph maguire and an-BY FELICIA SONMEZPresident Trump on Sunday
made a veiled threat toward House
Intelligence Committee Chairman
Adam B. Schiff, claiming without
evidence that the California Demo-
crat h ad leaked information from a
classified briefing in which a senior
U.S. intelligence official told law-
makers that russia wants to see
Trump reelected.
“Somebody please tell incompe-
tent (thanks for my high poll num-
bers) & corrupt politician Adam
‘Shifty’ Schiff to stop leaking Classi-
fied information or, even worse,
made up information, to the fake
News media,” Trump tweeted.
In tweet, Trump makes veiled threat toward Schiff over classified briefing
Biden, Buttigieg, Sen. Amy Klobu-
char (D-minn.) and former New
York mayor mike Bloomberg —
who appear to be competing for
many of the same voters and jock-
eying to survive as the lone alter-
native to Sanders.
for the proudly liberal and ac-
tivist wing of the Democratic Par-
ty, Sanders’s ascent has been wel-
comed as a potentially historic
development. robert reich, the
liberal former labor secretary and
a professor of public policy at the
University of California at Berke-
ley, said this moment can be
traced directly back to the 2008
financial crisis, which he called a
galvanizing event that led to a
surge in anti-establishment fer-
vor.
“This isn’t like 1972,” when lib-
eral Sen. George mcGovern (S.D.)
won the Democratic nomination
and collapsed in the general elec-
tion against richard m. Nixon,
reich said. “In 1972, America’s
middle class was still growing.
What you see here is a middle
class responding to not having a
raise in 40 years.”
Even if he fails to secure the
nomination outright at t he Demo-
cratic National Convention in mil-
waukee this summer, Sanders is
unlikely to go away quietly, aides
and friends said. They suggested
that Sanders’s long run and defi-
ant exit from the 2016 race —
doggedly carrying on with his
calls for a political revolution un-
til the final primary, weeks after
Hillary Clinton had effectively
sewn up the nomination — was a
revealing glimpse into his charac-
ter and his desire to move the
party t o the left.
“He doesn’t quit,” s aid Sanders
confidant and political adviser
Jeff Weaver. “He’s campaigning to
win.”
[email protected]
[email protected]Jenna Johnson and sean sullivan in
houston contributed to this report.added. “You go b ack historically to
roosevelt, to Kennedy, to Carter,
to Clinton, to obama. That’s how
Democrats win.”
Sanders is trying to counter the
assumption of many in the so-
called Democratic establishment
that he is too liberal to win a
general election.
“Some of the folks in the corpo-
rate media are getting a little bit
nervous,” Sanders said at a rally
Sunday afternoon in Houston be-
fore an enthusiastic crowd of
more than 6,200 at the University
of Houston. “A nd they say Bernie
can’t b eat Trump.”
Sanders then listed the results
of a few recent polls that he says
show him defeating the president
head-to-head n ationally as well as
in such states as michigan, Penn-
sylvania and Wisconsin.
Steve rosenthal, a veteran
Democratic labor strategist who
has been focused on mobilizing
working-class white voters in a
trio of battleground states —
michigan, Pennsylvania and Wis-
consin — said it would be foolish
to discount Sanders’s appeal
there.
“The establishment, which I
guess I’m a part of after all these
years, seems to know as much
about electability as a donkey
knows about calculus,” rosenthal
said. “We always get it wrong....
The voters are going to tell us
who’s e lectable.”
rep. ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a
national co-chair of the Sanders
campaign, said it is expanding its
outreach to a broader cross-sec-
tion of voters.
“He wants to build a coalition
like Bobby Kennedy or f.D.r. did
— one that is racially diverse and
reaches out to everyone,” Khanna
said. “We’re going to make a very
concerted effort over the next few
months to bring all the wings of
the Democratic Party onboard.”
Working to Sanders’s advan-
tage is the persistence of several
more moderate candidates —“I think it would be a real bur-
den for us in these states or con-
gressional districts that we have
to do well in,” Clyburn said on
ABC’s “This Week.” “ If you look at
how well we did the last time [in
the 2018 midterm elections] and
look at t he congressional districts,
these w ere not liberal or what you
might call progressive districts.
These were basically moderate
and conservative districts that we
did well in.”
Still, the rev. Jesse L. Jackson,
the civil rights leader who unsuc-
cessfully sought the Democratic
presidential nomination in 1984
and 1988 with a message about
“economic violence,” said it is
clear to h im that the party’s l iberal
wing is asserting control.
“They represent the direction
of the party,” said Jackson, who
said he has spoken recently with
Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth War-
ren (D-mass.). “They’re speaking
to the pain that people feel. And
Democrats are beginning to un-
derstand that democratic social-
ism doesn’t mean Eastern Euro-
pean socialism.”
randi Weingarten, p resident o f
the American federation of
Te achers, compared the disrup-
tive mood of Democratic voters
this year to the right-wing tea
party m ovement in 2010.
“They want to shake things up.
There is a sense that things are
broken, and prioritizing working
families has to be at the center of
the economic system,” s aid Wein-
garten, whose union has not en-
dorsed a candidate but last week
approved its members to support
Sanders, Warren or Biden.
former Wisconsin governor
Jim Doyle said Sanders “definitely
has tapped into the kind of youth-
ful enthusiasm and idealism t hat’s
been at t he heart of the Democrat-
ic Party for a long, long time.”
“Democrats are always best
when the race is one in which it’s
change versus status quo, and the
Democrats are change,” DoyleThe next primary is on Satur-
day in South Carolina, where the
latest polls show Biden leading
and Sanders running close be-
hind. The Super Tuesday contests
on march 3 may be decisive, with
voters in California, Te xas and
12 other states determining ap-
proximately o ne-third of the near-
ly 4,000 pledged delegates to be
awarded by primaries and caucus-
es.
Some other candidates have
stepped up their attacks on Sand-
ers in urgent hopes of blunting his
rise. Pete Buttigieg, the former
mayor of South Bend, Ind., has
been one of the most aggressive,
warning in a speech Saturday
night that Sanders as the party
standard-bearer could be disas-
trous for other Democrats on the
November ballot.
“Before we rush to nominate
Senator Sanders in our one s hot to
take on this president, let us take a
sober look at what is at stake for
our party, for our values and for
those with the most to lose,” s aid
Buttigieg, who ran third in Ne-
vada following a win in Iowa and a
second-place finish in New
Hampshire.
Sanders is bracing f or a harsher
assault to come from his Demo-
cratic rivals, including at Tuesday
night’s CBS News debate in South
Carolina.
“To finally be seeing it all start
to catch on is powerful, but he
knows they’re going to throw the
kitchen sink at h im. He’s a realist,”
said Sanders’s friend Ben Cohen,
the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice
cream a nd a Vermont-based liber-
al activist.
Some Democratic leaders are
sounding t he alarm about the par-
ty’s v iability in the November elec-
tion with Sanders atop the ticket.
House majority Whip James E.
Clyburn (D-S.C.), an ally of House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.),
said Sunday that Sanders could
jeopardize the party’s House ma-
jority.Sanders’s emphatic win in Ne-
vada illustrated his potential to
expand his coalition far beyond
the ceiling of 25 percent o r 30 per-
cent that many party-establish-
ment figures and commentators
assumed he had. In N evada, S and-
ers won with 29 percent of whites,
51 percent of Hispanics and
27 percent of blacks, according to
entrance polls of Democratic cau-
cus-goers. He won a staggering
65 percent of caucus-goers under
30 years old, and he carried every
other a ge g roup except for caucus-
goers over 65 years old, which
former vice president Joe Biden
won.
“In Nevada, we have just put
together a multigenerational,
multiracial coalition which is go-
ing to not only win in Nevada, it’s
going to sweep this country,”
Sanders said at his rally in San
Antonio on Saturday.
“We are bringing our people
together — black and white and
Latino, Native American, Asian
American, gay and straight,”
Sanders added. “We are bringing
our people together around an
agenda that works for the working
people of this country.”
Sanders’s dominance among
young people, his supporters say,
signals his ability to energize this
potentially important demo-
graphic i n November.
“Disregard electability,” said Is-
abel Lozoya, 19, a Texas State Uni-
versity student who drove for an
hour on Saturday to see Sanders
campaign in San Antonio. “It
should be about picking some-
body you really believe in as op-
posed t o somebody you think oth-
er people w ill believe in.”
The race for the nomination is
just getting started and remains
fluid, with a half-dozen contend-
ers still running, although Sand-
ers has clear momentum after
winning Nevada and the New
Hampshire primary, while finish-
ing second in the Iowa caucuses
by a tiny margin.Stern, a longtime former presi-
dent of the Service Employees In-
ternational Union. “The good
news for Bernie Sanders is, he’s
like a broken clock. He’s been in
the same place f or 35 or 40 years in
terms of his positions, and the
times have found him.”
A headstrong, 78-year-old sena-
tor, Sanders has galvanized his
supporters with an unwavering
commitment to their shared
cause and forceful critiques of the
“billionaire class.” They in turn
see him, despite his unorthodox
persona, as a weapon against a
governing class that has failed
them.
on the campaign trail, there is
an unusual intensity to Sanders’s
performances, reminiscent of the
energy that built around Trump
on the right during his 2016 rise.
Sanders has emerged as a move-
ment candidate, with his rallies
coast to coast drawing thousands
of people w ho wait for h ours to see
him.
Sanders’s stump speech is a l ib-
eral wish list — passing a Green
New Deal to combat climate
change; wiping out student debt
and paying for it by taxing Wall
Street; raising the federal mini-
mum wage to $15 per hour; re-
forming immigration laws to pro-
tect the undocumented; nominat-
ing liberals to the Supreme Court
and protecting abortion rights;
and, of course, his signature
health-care idea, medicare-for-
all, which has become a rallying
cry on the left.
“People who have been locked
out of power are speaking up
about corporate influence over
the issues that matter in their
lives,” said Abdul El-Sayed, a
Sanders ally and liberal organizer
who ran unsuccessfully for michi-
gan governor in 2018. “What
you’re seeing is a necessary and
natural readjustment in the Dem-
ocratic Party.”
sanders from a
As Sanders ascends, worried rivals struggle to blunt his rise
Callaghan O’hare/reuterssen. Bernie sanders (I-Vt.) celebrates his emphatic win i n the nevada caucuses saturday at a rally in san antonio. He and his allies insist he can beat President Trump, but his detractors say he is too polarizing.