Sen. Bernie Sanders has hired Faiz Shakir, a respected progressive operative who had been serving as the national political director for the American Civil Liberties Union, to manage his presidential campaign, an aide told CNN on Tuesday.
Shakir replaces Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ first presidential campaign manager, who will stay with Sanders as a senior adviser.
“Faiz is a diehard progressive who knows how to work effectively within the system,” Adam Jentleson, Reid’s former deputy chief of staff, told CNN on Tuesday. “Reid did not make a big decision without consulting Faiz. There’s no one he trusted more on how the progressive community would react on something and no one whose advice he took more seriously on pushing him to the left.”
Shakir also worked as an adviser at the Center for American Progress under its founder John Podesta, who would go on to become Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman. Sanders’ top foreign policy adviser, Matt Duss, was a colleague of Shakir’s during his time there.
“Faiz’s mission in life is to move all of Washington, D.
