Tulsi Gabbard picks sides in the Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren feud

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has come to the defense of Sen. Bernie Sanders in his war of words with fellow Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Gabbard, a Hawaii Democrat, shared a personal anecdote about a meeting she had with Sanders before declaring her own 2020 candidacy, saying the Democratic socialist from Vermont was nothing but supportive.

“We had a nice one-on-one conversation and I informed him that I would be running for President,” Gabbard tweeted Monday. “In that meeting, he showed me the greatest respect and encouragement, just as he always has.”

Gabbard has long been an ally and supporter of Sanders, going back to her 2016 endorsement of him over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary.

On Monday, the Vermont senator faced a slew of headlines when he denied a CNN report on a December 2018 meeting between himself and Warren in which he allegedly told the Massachusetts progressive that he didn’t think a woman could win the presidency in 2020. Warren said the report was accurate.

The Democratic senators met at Warren’s DC home before either publicly announced their decisions to run, and pledged to not go after one another directly while on the campaign trail, according to New York Magazine.

“That’s not what they wanted 2020 to be about,” the magazine’s report read.

But CNN reported that Sanders told Warren that he did not believe a woman could win the White House in 2020.

“It is ludicrous to believe that at the same meeting where Elizabeth Warren told me she was going to run for president, I would tell her that a woman couldn’t win,” Sanders said in a statement to CNN after the report was publicized.

“It’s sad that, three weeks before the Iowa caucus and a year after that private conversation, staff who weren’t in the room are lying about what happened,” he added.

Warren, however, remembered the meeting differently.

“Among the topics that came up was what would happen if Democrats nominated a female candidate. I thought a woman could win; he disagreed,” Warren wrote in a statement.

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