CNN audio reveals what Elizabeth Warren told Bernie Sanders in tense post-debate exchange
"I think you called me a liar on national TV."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign reportedly wanted to deescalate its intensifying dispute with Sen. Bernie Sanders headed into this week’s Democratic primary debate.
But after the debate ended Tuesday night, the Massachusetts senator directly confronted her longtime progressive ally on stage.
“I think you called me a liar on national TV,” Warren told Sanders in audio posted Wednesday night by CNN, which hosted the debate.
Footage of the terse exchange went viral late Tuesday night, after Warren and Sanders both doubled down on their conflicting accounts of a private 2018 meeting. Sanders had forcefully denied Warren’s assertion that he told her a woman could not win the presidency in 2020; Warren stood by her statement.
As the debate audience cheered all six candidates on stage, it had remained unclear what was said during their post-debate exchange, during which Warren did not shake Sanders’s outstretched hand.
But according to CNN, their brief conversation was captured on backup recordings from microphones both candidates were wearing. The audio was reportedly discovered Wednesday.
Warren: “I think you called me a liar on national TV.”
Sanders: “What?”
Warren: “I think you called me a liar on national TV.”
Sanders: “You know, let’s not do it right now. If you want to have that discussion, we’ll have that discussion.”
Warren: “Anytime.”
Sanders: “You called me a liar? You told me — all right, let’s not do it now.”
The conversation ended shortly after businessman and fellow Democratic candidate Tom Steyer walked up to greet the two candidates.
“I don’t want to get in the middle,” Steyer told Sanders. “I just want to say hi Bernie.”
“Yeah, good. OK,” Sanders replied.
According to CNN, Warren and Sanders had shaken hands when they arrived on stage at the beginning of the debate. Afterwards, they did not.
The exchange punctuated a 48-hour period during which the largely warm relationship between the Democratic primary race’s leading left-wing candidates — who refer to each other as friends and had often come to one another’s defense — swiftly turned cold.
After the Sanders campaign distributed talking points directing canvassers to point out that Warren’s support was more affluent, the Cambridge Democrat told reporters that she was “disappointed to hear that Bernie is sending his volunteers out to trash me.”
And after sources that had spoken to Warren told CNN about her recollection of Sanders doubting a woman could beat President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, Sanders issued a statement refuting the assertion.
“Anybody who knows me knows that it’s incomprehensible that I would think that a woman could not become president of the United States,” Sanders said during the debate Tuesday.
Left-wing groups have urged the two candidates to stop attacking each other and focus on their shared goals. And for their part, Warren and Sanders mostly have done so; according to CNN, neither campaign commented on the audio Wednesday night (the Sanders campaign has continued to attack Joe Biden for his past support for the Iraq War, NAFTA, and Social Security cuts).
On Twitter, Kristen Orthman, Warren’s communications director, simply retweeted a tweet Wednesday night from Sen. Brian Schatz, a Hawaii Democrat, responding to the breaking news.
“Anything else going on you guys might want to cover?” Schatz wrote.
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