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Clinton press secretary: 'Sanders campaign needs to take a timeout'

Bernie Sanders' campaign "needs to take a timeout," a top aide for Hillary Clinton said Thursday, amid escalating rhetoric from the Vermont senator's team over the past week, and in particular over the past day.

Sanders' remark Wednesday night that Clinton is not qualified to be president "speaks to the level of desperation" on his campaign, press secretary Brian Fallon said during a segment on MSNBC, remarking that the delegate math "is very daunting for them, and in the past few days, we’ve seen the rhetoric get out of hand."

"I think that the Sanders campaign needs to take a timeout," Fallon said, referring to Sanders' comment over qualifications the previous night, as well as recent remarks from Sanders' campaign manager Jeff Weaver.

On Tuesday evening following Sanders' big victory in Wisconsin, Weaver entreated Clinton's campaign live on CNN: "Don't destroy the Democratic Party to satisfy the secretary's ambitions to become president of the United States," adding, "We want to have a party at the end of this that we can unify."

Fallon also referred to Weaver's remark earlier Thursday morning in which he said Clinton made "a deal with the devil" in addressing her relationship with Wall Street.

"The Sanders campaign needs to take a deep breath here," Fallon said, noting that the Clinton campaign had disputed an anonymously sourced CNN report Wednesday that claimed its strategy was "disqualify him, defeat him and then, they can unify the party later" that had set off a fundraising email from Weaver and raised the hackles of Sanders' campaign.

"Our strategy is the same. We are going to point to contrasts, legitimate issue-based contrasts that exist between Secretary Clinton and Sen. Sanders. Among those are the comments that he made in the New York Daily News interview," he said. "But those errors, completely unforced on Sen. Sanders’ part, are his to account for. His inability to answer questions about how he would break up the banks when he’s made that a core issue of his campaign. That’s not an attack we leveled. That’s something that he’s been called out for across the board by observers everywhere.”

While expressing cautious optimism that Sanders' campaign "will wake up this morning and look at the headlines and realize that they went too far yesterday" and that Sanders would "take back his words," he also called on Sanders to quell disunity among his supporters.

"I do think that at the end of this, Sen. Sanders will do the right thing, and that he will urge his supporters to make sure that we elect a Democrat in 2016," Fallon said. “Of course, that is what Hillary Clinton did in 2008 after a very spirited contest between herself and then-Sen. Obama. I’m still confident that can happen. But we’ll never get to that point if Sen. Sanders repeats the type of rhetoric we heard yesterday.”