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By Alex Seitz-Wald
WASHINGTON – Some of his key strategists have left the campaign, while Bernie Sanders has just been elected president.
Tad Devine, Mark Longabaugh and Julian Mulvey, colleagues at a political advisory firm who all played a leading role in Sanders' 2016 campaign for the White House, separate from the senator, citing creative differences.
"The whole company is withdrawn, we are leaving the campaign," Longabaugh told NBC News on Tuesday. "We just did not have a meeting of the spirits."
Devine, an active member of the Democratic president, was a familiar television presence in 2016 as Sanders' chief strategist, charged with defining the rapid direction of the campaign while few other Washington insiders thought that the little known independent of Vermont could be a serious contender of the Democratic Presidential Nomination.
Longabaugh contributed to the design and implementation of the campaign roadmap for delegate research and negotiated with key external actors such as the Democratic National Committee on issues such as debates.
Mulvey helped create the company's ads for Sanders, including its best-known commercial, which included Simon & Garfunkel's song "America".
In total, the company produced 275 television, radio and Internet advertisements for this campaign and participated in most of the campaign's decision-making process.
"The campaign appreciates all the good work done by DML and wishes them good luck," Sanders' new campaign manager Faiz Shakir said in a statement, mentioning the name of their company.
The company had hired staff in anticipation of the Sanders 2020 campaign and had produced the video that Sanders had been announcing his campaign last week.
"We are leaving because we think that Senator Sanders deserves to have media consultants who share his creative vision of the campaign," said Devine, Longabaugh and Mulvey in a joint statement.
The firm was criticized by Sanders' allies for the money it had drawn from Sanders and its small fundraising machines, with $ 5.3 million in direct payments to the firm for the 2016 campaign, according to the reports of the Federal Electoral Commission.
Devine also had to face scrutiny for her work as an international consultant in Ukraine with former Trump campaign director Paul Manafort, who pleaded guilty to financial crimes and is awaiting conviction.
And Sanders is committed to diversifying the highest ranks of his campaign, which was predominantly white and male.
The Sanders campaign refused to immediately indicate who would replace the three men in their roles as admirers or strategists.
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