Yesterday I wrote about the misleading gun control claim being made by Hillary Clinton, i.e. that guns from Vermont were causing crime in New York. Today, Bernie Sanders took a shot a Clinton’s “credibility gap” over the same claim. Sanders team published a release on his campaign website Tuesday titled “Clinton’s Credibility Gap.” It reads:

Clinton’s credibility was questioned after she blamed Vermont for gun violence in New York. The charge backfired when The Washington Post called her assertion “significantly misleading.” Even Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin, a Clinton backer, said she was wrong. “It is campaign season, therefore, things are sometimes said by all the candidates that sometimes aren’t entirely accurate,” Shumlin told Vermont reporters.

The Post awarded Clinton 3 Pinocchios for her claim which uses a per capita estimate of guns traced to other states by the NYPD. Here’s an excerpt from the Post’s fact check:

Candace McCoy, professor at City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said per capita calculations are used to determine how likely a person in the population is to be threatened by a particular risk, such as the likelihood of a person being a victim of a violent crime.

“Here, the question is: if we want to cut off the supply line of guns into New York, what supply line is largest? That would not be Vermont,” McCoy said. For gun trafficking, it is “Iron Pipeline from the Southern states, garden hose from Vermont. It would be great to cut off both of them, but given the choice I would go with the pipeline.”

As I pointed out yesterday, official figures show that only 55 guns were traced back to Vermont by the NYPD in 2014. Furthermore, it is not clear if any of those guns were involved in violent crime. Having completely lost the argument on the facts, Clinton’s campaign spokesperson went on the attack, accusing Bernie Sanders of making an unfair character attack against Clinton:

.@BernieSanders' campaign has completely lost its compass it would seem. They just put out this release: pic.twitter.com/LqLQsagmRd

— Nick Merrill (@NickMerrill) April 12, 2016

Let's be very clear. This is a character attack. This is exactly what @BernieSanders pledged to his supporters that he wouldn't do.

— Nick Merrill (@NickMerrill) April 12, 2016

Sanders is calling Clinton out on an intentionally misleading factoid about his own state. And he is referring, obliquely, to her habit of making misleading statements when under pressure. Note to Camp Clinton, that is not an unfair character attack. We only need look at the Post fact-checkers work on Clinton’s private email claims to see this is so (and the Post left some out). Even Politifact, which often seems to favor Democrats in its fact-checking, found 50% of Hillary Clinton’s statements to be half-true or worse. The fact that Clinton and her husband are known for this sort of thing is why she has the credibility gap she does in poll after poll.

Clearly, I’m not in Sanders’ camp, but the idea that he has crossed some line of decorum or violated a promise by tacitly touching on Hillary’s longstanding habit of tap-dancing around the truth is laughable. It’s especially laughable when her staff is protesting over a response to Clinton’s latest misleading statement, a calculated attempt to confuse voters which Clinton and her staff just spent a week rolling out.