Wait, Wait, Bernie Sanders Never Said We Shouldn't Investigate Hillary Clinton's Emails

By Joanna Rothkopf | November 5, 2015 | 5:20pm

Politics

Sen. Bernie Sanders is turning up the berners underneath his pot of Hillary Clinton soup. Haha, nailed it.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, Sanders took a break from his public chumminess with Clinton, as well as from his stated exhaustion from conversations about her email account.

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If the way she used email had breached classification protocol, those are “valid questions,” he said.

“You get 12 seconds to say these things,” he said of his more congenial approach to the debate. “There’s an investigation going on right now. I did not say, ‘End the investigation.’ That’s silly…Let the investigation proceed unimpeded.”

Sanders also subtly criticized Clinton for her change of opinion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and on the vote to authorize the U.S. invasion of Iraq, both of which she supported originally.

Consistency on issues like these “does speak to the character of a person,” he said.

“It is very important to see which candidates have the courage to cast tough votes, to take on very, very powerful interests.”

Thus far, the Democratic race has been largely polite, but in the past several weeks, Clinton has also begun to suggest that Sanders is not a harmless old hippie, calling him out for sexist tone-policing, and, recently, for assuming that guns are just an “urban” (read: black) problem.

“When you look at some of the polls that have come out recently, we often do better than Hillary Clinton in running against the Republicans,” Sanders said in an interview with NPR.

“I probably can and will do better in drawing a contrast,” he continued. “There are significant differences of opinion between Hillary Clinton and myself.”

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Image via Getty.