Bernie Sanders has accepted the invitation to debate in Brooklyn next week—but he doesn’t seem so happy about it.
In a sarcastic press release Monday, the Sanders campaign said it would be moving the date of a planned rally to attend the CNN debate on April 14, just days before the New York primary.
“It’s great for the people of New York that there will be a debate in Brooklyn, something that the Clinton campaign has long opposed,” Sanders’ spokesman Michael Briggs said in a statement. “Fortunately, we were able to move a major New York City rally scheduled for April 14 to the night before. We hope the debate will be worth the inconvenience for thousands of New Yorkers who were planning to attend our rally on Thursday.”
The two Democratic candidates have been squabbling over dates for a New York debate, trading harshly worded press releases and jabs during interviews with the media, after Sanders challenged Clinton to a New York debate last month.
“We had thought the Sanders campaign would have accepted our offer for a Brooklyn debate on April 14 in a New York minute, but it ended up taking a few extra days for them to agree,” Brian Fallon, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said in a statement to the New York Times.
The debate, which will be moderated by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, is to be the candidates’ first since the Univision-Washington Post debate on March 9.