Bernie Sanders told Elizabeth Warren during a private meeting that a woman can't win the presidency

Mary Schwalm/Reuters

Sen. Elizabeth Warren puts her arm around Sen. Bernie Sanders after introducing him at a Our Revolution rally in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 31, 2017.

• Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont told Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts that he didn't believe a woman could win the 2020 election, according to multiple media reports.
• He made the comment during a private meeting with Warren in December 2018 before she launched her campaign, CNN reported.
• Sanders vehemently denied the reports on Monday, and Warren's campaign declined to comment.
• Nonetheless, the explosive story will likely be brought up during Tuesday's Democratic primary debate and as the truce between the Warren and Sanders campaigns shows signs of fraying.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont told Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts that he didn't believe a woman could be president, according to several media reports.

Sanders made the comment to Warren in a closed-door meeting between the two of them in December 2018, CNN, which first broke the story, reported.

CNN's reporting was later confirmed by The New York Times and BuzzFeed News.

Sanders and Warren, who have been longtime friends and publicly champion the progressive movement, met to discuss their electoral strategy before entering the 2020 presidential race.

According to CNN, Warren laid out two reasons she believed she was well positioned to beat President Donald Trump: She could make a strong argument for economic growth and garner support from female voters.

Sanders responded that he didn't think a woman could win the election.

Specifically, according to The Times, Sanders told Warren that Trump would employ sexism to hurt her chances against him and that his attacks would stop her from winning the race.

News reports detailing the interaction cited several people who said they heard an account of the conversation directly from Warren in the weeks that followed.

Sanders, who has skyrocketed in recent polls and hauled in more than $30 million in fundraising in the last quarter of 2019, slammed the characterization of the meeting in a statement to CNN.

"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," the Vermont senator said.

He added: "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. What I did say that night was that Donald Trump is a sexist, a racist and a liar who would weaponize whatever he could. Do I believe a woman can win in 2020? Of course! After all, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes in 2016."

The Warren campaign declined to comment on the story.

Revelations about the explosive meeting come one day before the seventh Democratic presidential debate, which will take place in Iowa and is hosted by CNN and the Des Moines Register.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, Sanders, Warren, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and businessman Tom Steyer qualified for the debate.

In order to qualify, candidates had to secure 225,000 unique donors and earn 5% in four DNC-approved national polls or 7% in two DNC-approved early state polls released between November 16 and January 10.

Of the candidates who met the donor threshold, Andrew Yang obtained just one qualifying poll, and Sen. Cory Booker, who dropped out of the presidential race altogether on January 13, had zero. That means this week's Democratic debate will be the first to have no candidates of color onstage.

Monday's media reports about the Sanders-Warren meeting will likely be brought up during the debate. It'll probably add fuel to the fire as the truce between the two senators' campaigns has shown signs of fraying in recent days.

Politico reported over the weekend that the Sanders campaign created a script that painted Warren as an elitist candidate.

Specifically, according to Politico, the script described the Massachusetts senator as someone who appeals to "highly-educated, more affluent people who aer going to show up and vote Democratic no matter what" and that she would bring "no new bases to the Democratic party."

Sanders later denied knowing anything about the script, saying it had come from someone who "[said] things that they shouldn't [have]."

Grace Panetta contributed to this report.

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