The 2016 Blast The latest POLITICO scoops and coverage of the 2016 elections. Email Sign Up

Tweets from https://twitter.com/politico/lists/team-politico



Sanders: Clinton has moved closer to me

Bernie Sanders dug into Hillary Clinton on Friday, remarking in an interview that the former secretary of state has gradually moved further to his positions on the issues that matter to Americans as the campaign has progressed.

On ABC's "Good Morning America," the show played a clip from a "Saturday Night Live" skit in which Clinton (played by Kate McKinnon) gradually changes in physical appearance to resemble Sanders, going from her signature pantsuit to Sanders' suit and white hair. The Vermont senator smiled throughout the clip, commenting, "I think if you look at issue after issue after issue, she has moved very much closer to us."

"But I think the real—I think what people have got to look at is, who has been there for decades?" Sanders asked. "Who was time after time taken on the special interest, whether it’s Wall Street, the drug companies, the fossil fuel industries? I think if people check the record, they’ll find that Bernie Sanders was there a lot earlier than Hillary Clinton.”

He also accused his Democratic opponent of taking his remarks "out of context" in response to Donald Trump's call to punish women who get abortions should the procedure be outlawed.

"I believe it’s a serious issue. I’ve been spending my entire political life fighting for the right of a woman to control her own body," Sanders said, a day after Clinton told a New York audience that her opponent's characterization of Trump's remarks as a "distraction" represented a minimization of the issue.

Sanders' campaign fired back with a statement Thursday, and the candidate himself defended his approach on ABC, as well.

"I have a 100 percent voting record, pro-choice voting record, and if elected president, not only will I continue to defend a woman’s right to choose, I will take on those Republican governors all across the country who are trying to restrict and take away that right," he remarked. "What Secretary Clinton did is take things out of context. I am 100 percent pro-choice and will defend women’s right to choose.”

He sounded a similar tone when asked by ABC's David Muir if he would ever go negative in a general election campaign against Trump.

“What I will do is contrast my record to Republicans who want to cut Social Security, want to cut Medicare, believe that climate change is a hoax, want to give hundreds of billions of dollars to tax breaks to the one-tenth of one percent," he said. "So I will contrast my record, but I think the American people want to hear about the issues relevant to their lives, not about savage attacks against other people.”

Sanders also responded to his supporters interrupting one of Clinton's campaign appearances on Thursday, in addition to a Greenpeace activist who confronted Clinton over her donations received from the fossil fuel industry.

“Well I’m not crazy about people disrupting meetings. But the fact of the matter is Secretary Clinton has taken significant sums of money from the fossil fuel industry. She raises her money with her super PACs, she gets a lot of money from Wall Street, from the drug companies, from the fossil fuel industry," he said. "On the other hand, we have received over six million individual campaign contributions averaging $27 apiece. I’m proud of the way we are raising money.”

Sanders, whose campaign announced Friday that it raised $44 million in March alone, also touted his campaign's 2 million individual contributions.

“By the way," he said, twisting the knife, "we have twice as many individual contributions as her."