A Family Affair: David Sirota's Wife, A Public Official, Backed Bernie Sanders After Husband Began Secretly Helping Campaign

After The Atlantic's Edward-Isaac Dovere broke the story of Bernie Sanders secretly paying or negotiating to pay one David Sirota as he was libeling Sanders's opponents in the Democratic primary and the Democratic party in general, Bernie's defenders on the web have gone apoplectic. Being completely unable to pick apart the core of the story - that Bernie Sanders and David Sirota have been communicating throughout the time of Sirota's wrath against Democrats - the defenders have instead tried to challenge timelines Dovere reported, as to whether or not Sirota was writing for particular media outlets when the Sanders campaign officially opened negotiations with him.

We will soon have a story on Sirota and Sanders's insidious timeline. But this is not that story. No, this is a different story.

Emily Sirota, David Sirota's wife and a member of the Colorado House, endorsed Bernie Sanders just four days after her husband began secret negotiations with the campaign while he continued to call himself a "journalist" and continued to bludgeon Bernie's competitors. Bernie Sanders and his campaign did not then, and has not at the time of this writing, disclosed this fact. Neither did Rep. Sirota or her "journalist" husband disclose the secret negotiations when Rep. Sirota publicly endorsed Sanders.

I have to thank one of the pro-Bernie, pro-Sirota folks on Twitter for making this job easy for me. You see, were it not for their zeal to shield Sanders and Sirota from rightful criticism of their horrendous ethics, I would have had to actually do some digging to find this. But they are who they are, and they are currently inundating Twitter with the following screenshot of an email from Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign manager from Faiz Shakir purporting to contradict one of the timelines reported by Dovere in his original piece in The Atlantic.



A little blurry, but the important part is visible enough. Bernie Sanders's campaign manager, in writing, claimed that David Sirota began informally advising Bernie's 2020 presidential campaign on February 20.

On February 24, Sirota's wife sent a tweet endorsing Bernie Sanders for president.


The Sirotas and Bernie Sanders have been long-time pals, of course. Sanders gave Sirota a job in his comms shop right after Sirota was fired from a Democratic mayoral campaign for running a racist website. Neither Sirota nor Sanders made it a practice to disclose that his loyalty to Sanders may at least partially be due to the paychecks early in his career, either.

Despite the loud protests from the likes of Faiz Shakir, Bernie's current campaign manager, and Glenn Greenwald, the Russian asset and former boss of Bernie Sanders's new national press secretary, David Sirota himself provided to Colorado Politics a photo of himself and Bernie Sanders talking at a political fundraiser for an organization that does not seem have filed any FEC reports. The fundraiser was organized by none other than Emily Sirota, whom Sanders had endorsed in a contested Democratic primary earlier in 2018.

Just the recent timeline is indictment enough. Throughout the 2016 cycle, David Sirota pummelled Hillary Clinton, and it didn't stop with the primary campaign. His vicious attacks continued until the day before election day. In early 2018, Bernie Sanders endorses David Sirota's wife for the Colorado state House, and weeks before the 2018 midterms, Bernie Sanders headlines a fundraiser hosted by Emily Sirota, with David Sirota present and in person with Bernie Sanders. Bernie's campaign admits that less than four months after this Sirota-organized, Sanders-headlined political fundraiser, secret negotiations began with David Sirota, while Sirota continues to cudgel Democrats. And according to the campaign's own timeline, a contract is signed upon Sanders's personal approval within weeks after that.

Now, sure, one can choose to believe that the consistent reciprocal backscratching of Sirota, his wife, and Bernie Sanders is completely coincidental. You can choose to believe that David Sirota's stanning for Bernie throughout the years had no bearings on Sanders's decision to endorse his wife in a contested Democratic primary. You can choose to believe that Bernie Sanders showed up at a political fundraiser organized by Emily Sirota and David Sirota proudly distributed a photo of him with Sanders at the fundraiser, but there was no discussion about Sirota's support for a certain Sanders candidacy that would begin in earnest. You can choose to believe whatever you want.

But if you do, I just have one question.

Would you choose to believe the same things if, in place of Bernie Sanders, David Sirota, and Emily Sirota, the characters in this story were Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Elaine Chao instead?

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