Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders accused rival Hillary Clinton of being too quick to support regime change in Syria at a debate on Saturday dominated by national security issues and how best to defeat Islamic State militants.
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Clinton and Sanders were joined by former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley who lags in the polls.
Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton battled Sen.
The concerns follow complaints by Sanders and O’Malley that the Democratic Committee has been protecting Clinton by limiting the number of presidential debates and holding three of them on weekends, when voters are less likely to be home watching television.
If Google searches are any guide, the only states that really cared about any of the candidates debating were Vermont and New Hampshire, where the debate was held.
Sanders was more vocal on foreign policy than in past debates.
Each candidate took shots at the Republican front-runner, billionaire developer Donald Trump.
While the first line is familiar – many have suggested Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric could or will be used by terror groups to boost recruiting – there is no evidence so far that the real estate developer has been shown in ISIS videos as a marketing tool, as CNN’s Reality Check team determined.
When they found out about the breached data on Friday, they made a decision to punish Mr. Sanders’ campaign by suspending their access to their own data.
Clinton said Americans need to be united against the threats the country faces, and that Muslim-Americans must be part of that united front.
“He is becoming ISIS’s best recruiter”. The candidate was about 30 seconds late getting back to her lectern, arriving as Muir began asking a question despite her absence.
Sanders said Clinton is too enamored by replacing dictatorial regimes, making the Middle East even more volatile. She also drew laughs when asked: “Should corporate America love Hillary Clinton?”. Officials have since launched an internal investigation to determine whether any other staff members reviewed the documentation. But early in Saturday’s debate he staked out that issue as a key distinction between himself and Clinton. “I said I want to be the president for the struggling, for the surviving and the successful”. “This is not the campaign that we brought”.
Clinton, meanwhile, said while she agrees with O’Malley’s call for “commonsense gun safety measures”, she wishes he wouldn’t misrepresent her record.
“I don’t think the American people are all that interested in this”, she said.
“We are pleased that the Sanders campaign has agreed to submit to an independent audit to determine the full extent of the intrusion its staff carried out earlier this week”, Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said in a statement.
She also disagreed with Sanders’ assertion that the United States military should prioritise the fight against ISIL over working to get Assad to leave power, saying both should be done at the same time. “We now have that”, Clinton said. “My plan is to… tell Saudi Arabia that instead of going to war in Yemen they, one of the wealthiest countries on Earth, are going to have to go to war against ISIS”. They all argued that his policy of banning immigration of Muslims would lead only to more violence.
“Arming more people is not the appropriate response to terrorism”, she said. Other Republican candidates hardly figured in the debate, thus reflecting that all of them consider him as their main rival.
She said that “it was not in America’s interest to react with this kind of fear and respond to this sort of bigotry”.
“CEOs of large multinationals are not going to like me”, Sanders said.
Clinton also defied moderators’ efforts to cut her off at times, leading Sanders to call out, “Now this is getting to be fun”.
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“Thank you, good night and may the force be with you”, she said.
