Hillary Clinton took a long bathroom break during the middle of the Democratic debate on Saturday, causing her to miss the beginning of a round of questioning, leaving just Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley on the stage.
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“Yes, I apologise”, Sanders said replying to a question after he acknowledged that his presidential election campaign “by mistake” intruded into the election data base of Clinton. O’Malley, who is polling a distant third behind Clinton and Sanders, also expressed hope the campaign can move on to discussing “pressing” issues with the economy and national security rather than “bickering back and forth”.
Sanders also says he wants to make “secondary” the fight against Syrian leader Bashar Assad and focus exclusively on defeating the Islamic State. Sanders explained the chronology of what transpired, criticized the Clinton campaign for trying to make hay of it in the press, but then offered an apology to her, which Clinton said she appreciated.
But not all has been negative for Mr. Sanders; a few hours before the debate Politico reported that, on Friday alone, his campaign raised a million dollars from his supporters.
This is a result, he said, of “flip-flopping” by Sanders and Clinton.
The Vermont senator, however, renewed his criticism of the Democratic National Committee for freezing access to his own voter files until the issue was resolved late on Friday and called it an “egregious act”. “This is not the type of campaign that we run”. “We should move on because I don’t think the American people are all that interested in this”.
“I’m curious, eight years later, should corporate America love Hillary Clinton?”.
She said Islamic State militants were showing videos of billionaire tycoon Mr Trump talking about his proposed ban as a recruitment tool.
She said Americans need to be united against the threats the country faces, and that Muslim-Americans must be part of that united front.
O’Malley, meanwhile, took issue with both Clinton and Sanders’ records on so-called gun-control measures, painting himself as the toughest candidate on the issue.
The Sanders camp admits that at least one staffer inappropriately accessed Clinton’s voter database. The Vermont senator’s campaign even sued the DNC to restore its access, after the party cut if off from the database.
He says he looks forward to working with Clinton’s campaign on an independent investigation.
According to Clinton, it is best not to respond “to this sort of bigotry”.
Sanders used the opportunity bring up Clinton’s 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq and suggested that she was too quick to intervene in the affairs of other countries. But Sanders trotted out a series of issues where he stands to Clinton’s left. And when she said she understood that people are fearful after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, she pivoted to attack Trump. “The troops on the ground shouldn’t be American troops”.
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Sanders has accused Clinton of being too cozy with Wall Street and running a campaign funded by wealthy executives, charges she has rejected.
