Bernie Sanders’s elder brother rips Bill Clinton in a new interview, suggesting the media is too focused debating whether the former president is a “terrible rapist” or “nice rapist.”
He also suggests that his brother, a self-described democratic socialist running for the Democratic presidential nomination, is “very socialist” in his view of “class warfare.”
{mosads}“Bill Clinton has leapt in to try and make it personal with Bernard,” Larry Sanders, 80, who lives in England, told The Daily Beast for an interview published Friday. He described Clinton as a “dreadful” president for poor people.
Sanders went on to argue that “a lot of bad key policies didn’t come in under the Bushes” but stemmed from the Clinton administration, mentioning changes in the welfare system and the North American Free Trade Agreement.
“The media have a lot to answer for, I think, you don’t get that detailed discussion. You get: ‘Is Hillary a nice person? Is Bill really such a terrible rapist or is he a nice rapist?'” he said.
“It’s at that level the discussion — so you can imagine that people could have a pleasant opinion but not based on the actual policies,” Sanders added, emphasizing that he didn’t “dislike” Hillary Clinton, his brother’s rival in the primary race and former first lady.
Bill Clinton’s sexual history was thrown into the spotlight early this year after Republican front-runner Donald Trump knocked Hillary Clinton as being “an enabler.”
The former secretary of State has mostly brushed off the attacks, with aides ripping them as “reprehensible.” Bernie Sanders has steered clear of the issue for the most part as well, saying they were not fair game now in the campaign.
Kathleen Willey, one of the women who alleged sexual misconduct about Bill Clinton in the 1990s, has said she plans to campaign against Hillary Clinton.
In the Beast interview, Larry Sanders also described his brother as “very socialist.”
“Bernard is a genuine socialist in his sense of class warfare — that he thinks there is not a national interest so much as there is an interest with sectors of the population,” he said.
The Clinton and Sanders campaigns did not comment for the Beast report.