“She’s a Marxist,” the Republican presidential candidate said in 2012 of the not-yet-elected Democratic senator.

Keith Srakocic / AP

During a 2012 meet and greet in South Carolina, Rick Santorum called then-Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren "a Marxist."

The former senator from Pennsylvania made the comments in October 2012, just days before Warren would be elected senator of Massachusetts. Santorum, who is running for president again this year, was talking about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, formed under the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010 and originally proposed by Warren as a Harvard Law Professor in 2007.

"There's a brand new bureaucracy, which is the Consumer Protection Bureau, CFB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or something. Branded. Not funded by Congress. They set it up as an independent agency, funded through the Fed. Not by Congress," he explained. "And accountable to nobody, except the president. So there's no accountability. And this is the thing set up by this woman, created by this woman named Elizabeth Warren, who, uh, who is a Marxist."

"She's a Marxist," he said. "And believes that the federal government should basically be able to tell the marketplace what products they should offer to certain groups of people dependent on their financial condition. And that government knows best. And they are gonna regulate the living daylights out of consumer credit. It's, uh, it's a scary thing."