Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) says Bernie Sanders never got a fair chance from the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
“Bernie really had a movement out there, and it wasn’t right to treat him that way,” Reid said Wednesday from the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, according to The Huffington Post.
{mosads}“I knew — everybody knew — that this was not a fair deal,” he added.
Reid said outgoing DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz wasn’t impartial during the Democratic primary.
“Debbie Wasserman Schultz, she’s always been good to me,” he said of the Florida House Democrat. “I like her just fine.
“I know she’s tried hard, but as some people probably know, I thought Bernie deserved somebody that was not critical to him. So I’m sorry she had to resign, but it was the right thing to do. She should have done it sooner.”
Reid also said Democrats don’t have a backup plan if anything damaging about their presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, emerges in future email leaks.
“No,” he said.
WikiLeaks last week published a trove of 20,000 DNC emails from last January to late May of this year.
Some of the messages showed top DNC officials seemingly planning to undermine Sanders’s presidential campaign. The leak only intensified the tensions between Wasserman Schultz and the Vermont senator’s supporters, many of whom accused her of tilting the primary in favor of Clinton.
Wasserman Schultz announced Sunday she would resign after her party’s convention ends this week.
Sanders has moved to unify the party after an at-times bitter primary fight with Clinton. In a speech Monday, he urged his supporters to back Clinton. And on Tuesday, he moved for Democrats to nominate Clinton for the presidency, a gesture of party unity.