Mr. Sanders toggled Sunday between contrition and disgust with how the DNC handled the incident, saying the organization leaked some information to the press and the Clinton camp before briefing him on what had gone wrong.

“Police officers should not be shooting unarmed people, predominantly African Americans”, Sanders said.

When asked about the remark following the debate, the Clinton campaign pointed to a comment from an analyst for the SITE Intelligence Group to NBC News.

U.S. Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton backed elements of President Barack Obama’s strategy to fight Islamic State militants in a debate on Saturday in which she clashed with top rival Bernie Sanders over national security and the economy.

“He is becoming ISIS’ best recruiter”, she charged.

“Knowing the Clintons and knowing Hillary, she made it up”, he said.

By contrast, it nearly seems at times as if Sanders, Clinton’s principal challenger, believes she is probably going to win the Democratic nomination and, while eager to delineate their differences and pull her closer to his leftist views, does not want to undercut her chances of keeping Republicans out of the White House next November.

“One of the reasons why I have advocated for a no-fly zone is in order to create those safe refugees within Syria, to try to protect people on the ground both from (Syrian President Bashar) al-Assad’s forces, who are continuing to drop barrel bombs and from ISIS”.

“This great country and our government belong to all of us, not just a handful of billionaires”, he said, declining to mention national security at all in his closing statement.

“Regime change is easy, getting rid of dictators is easy. Do you think that’s a coincidence?”

Clinton’s campaign also sent Business Insider a tweet from an alleged ISIS sympathizer’s account that commented on Trump’s refusal to rule out the potential creation of the registry for Muslim-Americans.

Hitting the DNC too hard on Saturday night would have gone against his image as an earnest old liberal dead-set on addressing issues. To turn that level of early energy into a national victory, Sanders must find a way to expand his appeal in a race in which economic uncertainty is increasingly taking a back seat to security concerns. “I mean, she made it up”.