Unwilling to leave the national stage, Bernie Sanders is preparing to launch a new political action effort on Wednesday, even as it is rocked by controversy and mass resignations among the top staff he personally picked to run it.

The so-called Our Revolution movement is set to be kicked off on Wednesday night when Mr Sanders, who was beaten to the Democratic presidential nomination by Hillary Clinton after a bitter fight, will address house parties across the country in a live-streaming video feed.

Some might see it as the Bernie Sanders Grudge Tour. The leftist Senator from Vermont will pitch his new organisation as an attempt to keep the anti-establishment, anti-Wall Street promises of his campaign alive in part by directing resources to candidates who share them.

A top priority, he told supporters in an email, will be to help boost the campaign of Tim Canova, a liberal Democrat running against Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz in Florida. He repeatedly tangled with Ms Wasserman Schultz, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee, DNC, during the primary season alleging that she was trying to favour Ms Clinton.

The launch comes just as Ms Clinton is being rocked by new revelations about special access that was granted to her office while she was US Secretary of State to individuals who had donated cash to the Clinton Foundation, set up by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, after he left office.

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Already, however, the whole enterprise is in turmoil, thanks to the resignations of several of its top staff members even before it was off the ground, who were angered by the decision of Senator Sanders and his wife, Jane Sanders, to appoint his former campaign manager, John Weaver, as its top officer over their very clearly expressed objections.

Among those heading to the exits was Claire Sandberg, who was the digital organising director of the campaign and the organising director of Our Revolution. Her entire department of four people quit, in fact.

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She and the others who joined the revolt, including Kenneth Pennington, who was to be the digital director of Our Revolution, were opposed to Mr Weaver’s involvement both for reasons of personality clashes and because they felt he mismanaged the Senator’s campaign in part by spending too much money on television advertising and failing to harness grassroots support.

They also contended that Mr Weaver would only exacerbate an additional concern they had with the new entity namely that it has been set up as a so-called 501(c)(4) organisation, which, because of its charitable status, is in theory not allowed to work directly with the election of political candidates and is able to receive large sums from anonymous donors.

A large part of the premise of Mr Sanders’s campaign for president had been precisely to wean political campaigns from the flood of dark money that flows into them. That the Our Revolution entity has been set up precisely to take such money looked to them like a betrayal.

According to several reports a majority of the staff appointed to run the new outfit resigned as soon as the appointment of Mr Weaver was confirmed on Monday.

“I left and others left because we were alarmed that Jeff would mismanage this organisation as he mismanaged the campaign,” Ms Sandberg told the New York Times, saying Mr Weaver would “betray its core purpose by accepting money from billionaires and not remaining grass-roots funded and plowing that billionaire cash into TV instead of investing it in building a genuine movement.”

Bernie and Jane Sanders. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)

“It’s about both the fundraising and the spending: Jeff would like to take big money from rich people including billionaires and spend it on ads,” she explained to Politico. “That’s the opposite of what this campaign and this movement are supposed to be about and after being very firm and raising alarm the staff felt that we had no choice but to quit.”

Urging supporters to show up on Wednesday with an email titled “Bernie’s Next Steps”, Mr Sanders promised them a “movement to empower a wave of progressive candidates this November and win the major upcoming fights for the values we share”. He went on: “We'll also talk about how you can be a key movement builder in your community for Our Revolution”.

In a separate fund-raising letter, he specifically addressed his desire to see Ms Wasserman Schultz defeated. She was forced to resign as head of the DNC on the eve of the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia last month after hacked emails made public by Wikileaks indicated that the committee had indeed voiced some preference for Ms Clinton becoming the party’s nominee.