Sanders’ speechwriter, David Sirota, lambasted Biden in a series of tweets, telling supporters that he “isn’t getting away with rewriting history about how he helped lead America into the Iraq War.”

Sanders’ senior campaign adviser Jeff Weaver later released a statement saying Biden “made explicitly clear that he was voting for war.”

“It is appalling that after 18 years Joe Biden still refuses to admit he was dead wrong on the Iraq War, the worst foreign policy blunder in modern American history,” Weaver said.

Biden has struggled to explain his vote for the Iraq war, which has become a key issue in the Democratic primary heightened by recent conflict in the Gulf.

“I did make a bad judgment, trusting the president saying he was only doing this to get inspectors in and get the U.N. to agree to put inspectors in,” Biden said during the second Democratic debate in July.



In September, Biden stated he was opposed to Bush’s invasion from the get-go. “He got them in, and before we know it, we had a ‘shock and awe.’ Immediately, the moment it started, I came out against the war,” Biden said in an NPR interview, though his campaign later acknowledged he misspoke.

Biden and his surrogates have also contended that it was never Biden‘s intention to grant permission for the United States to conduct a war indefinitely.

The Iraq war vote has come to the forefront of the 2020 election as relations with Iraq have deteriorated in recent weeks following the U.S. killing of Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike near Baghdad.

Both Biden and Sanders have repeatedly criticized the Trump administration's move to kill Soleimani.

Iraq’s parliament responded to Soleimani's killing by voting to demand all U.S. forces leave the country, a move Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the U.S. is unwilling to adhere to.