The Knoxville campaign office of Michael Bloomberg was vandalized Thursday night — and the campaign manager is blaming the Bernie Sanders camp.
“This latest incident at our Knoxville campaign office is exactly what we’ve been warning about,” Campaign Manager Kevin Sheekey said in a statement. “We don’t know who is responsible for this vandalism, but we do know it echoes language from the Sanders campaign and its supporters.”
Per Scott Erland, the Knoxville Police Department public information officer, there are no suspects, witness information or nearby video cameras. The spray painting happened either late Thursday night or early Friday morning.
“We are assigning an investigator from the Property Crimes Unit to investigate the incident,” he added.
Campaign spokeswoman Galia Slayen told TPM that the vandals wrote “Resist,” “Fuck Bloomberg” and “Oligarch” on the building.
In his statement, Sheekey included examples of Sanders and his team using similar verbiage. The Bloomberg campaign did not respond to a question about if they had any further evidence, but is calling on Sanders to disavow the destruction which officials say has happened at other campaign offices too.
The Sanders campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Sanders and Bloomberg have been sparring for days, not least over transparency about their respective physical health. Bloomberg has been calling for Sanders to release his full health records, and a Sanders surrogate falsely stated that Bloomberg had suffered from heart attacks.
However, Sanders has taken heat from multiple candidates about the infamously vicious behavior of some of his supporters, especially online. He tried to wash his hands of the accusations during the Nevada debate on Wednesday, suggesting that perhaps foreign bots were masquerading as badly behaving Sanders fans to create disruption. Experts have concluded that there is no proof that that.
