WATCH: Billionaire-Blasting Warren Says She’d Take Money From Billionaire Bloomberg In The General If He Offered

Following Friday night’s Democratic primary debate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) sat down with Dana Bash and Erin Burnett of CNN for an interview.

After Warren spoke about her travels to “31 states and Puerto Rico,” and that she isn’t “sucking up to billionaires and spending 70% of [her] time on fund raising,” Burnett asked a follow-up question pertaining to rival and billionaire Michael Bloomberg.

The following exchange occurred:

BURNETT: On this issue of billionaires – you brought it up, obviously, with Mayor Pete and specifically the PACs and everything else – you know, Mayor Bloomberg obviously is out there now, right? He’s spending a lot of money, and he has said if he’s not the nominee, he’s willing to support whoever is.

WARREN: Good.

BURNETT: If that’s you, would you take his money?

WARREN: Sure.

Warren then explained her perception of the difference between what her rivals are doing and what she would be doing in accepting Bloomberg’s donations:

Because look, what I believe is that we should not be selling access to our time. You know, this isn’t for special meetings and listen to my little issue. This is about how our democracy should work. I get it, rich people can own more shoes than the rest of us, more cars than the rest of us, maybe more houses than the rest of us – but by golly, they shouldn’t own a bigger share of our democracy.

Warren also took the opportunity to criticize the idea of a wealthy person self-financing their campaign: “And that is why, for me, I think we should not be doing these campaigns either letting billionaires finance themselves, or using unlimited spending through Super PACs which everybody on that stage was using except [Sen. Amy Klubuchar] and me.”

The senator from Massachusetts went on to note that she has funded her campaign via a “grassroots” effort by asking Americans to go to her website and “pitch in $5 because our democracy is at state.”

If we’re going to be a country, if we’re going to be a Democratic Party, where the only way you get the nomination is you either are a billionaire or you suck up to billionaires, then buckle up because we’re going to have a country that’s just going to work better and better for billionaires, and leave working people and everyone else behind.

Earlier in the debate, Warren had railed against billionaires self-funding campaigns, as well as the influence of PAC money.

Warren hasn’t always shunned big donors. A September 2019 piece in The New York Times detailed how the senator reportedly used approximately $10.4 million in “leftover funds from her 2018 Senate campaign to underwrite her 2020 run, a portion of which was raised from the same donor class she is now running against.”

This shift from accepting cash from big donors to running a “grassroots” presidential campaign has rubbed some people the wrong way.

The NYT piece goes on to note that former Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, who had both donated to and “recruited donors” for Warren’s 2018 Senate re-election campaign, had decided to support former Vice President Joe Biden. “Can you spell hypocrite?” he reportedly stated, apparently referencing Warren.