Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) used his official account to repeat a barb from the campaign trail directed at Hillary Clinton.
It’s a direct quote from his Tuesday campaign speech at Iowa Western Community College, delivered a few days after he sparred with the Democratic presidential front-runner on the debate stage over whether corporate America should love her despite her tough talk on Wall Street.
{mosads}After Clinton joked to the debate moderator that “everybody should” love her, Sanders took a different tack.
“CEOs of large multinationals may like Hillary,” he said. “They ain’t gonna like me. And Wall Street is gonna like me even less.”
Campaigns are not allowed to use official resources for campaign actions, which complicates the landscape for elected officials running for office.
Symone Sanders, a campaign spokeswoman, said she couldn’t comment as to the official tweet or whether the senator saw it, but noted that the quote came in response to a question on Wall Street.
“The exchange was around Wall Street and would Wall Street love Sen. Sanders. He answered no because he has worked his entire political life out there on behalf of working class families,” she said.
An aide from Sanders’s Senate office reiterated that point to The Hill.
“Sen. Sanders has been talking about taking on Wall Street and defending working families for his entire career,” the aide said.
“He has said similar things on the floor of the Senate and the House. This tweet simply expands on that message, which has been the central theme of his political life.”
Lawrence Noble, general counsel of the Campaign Legal Center, told The Hill that the tweet’s “content [is] clearly at that line of what is campaign content.”
“That is getting very close to the line on what is campaign oriented, especially in the context of what was said at the debate,” he said, noting that it’s unclear whether either the Federal Election Commission or the Senate would find this worthy of further scrutiny.
This story was updated at 5:23 p.m.
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