Fallon said the Sanders campaign staff conducted 25 searches from four different accounts, saving the data into the Sanders campaign account.
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First an explanation of the data breach: Like its Republican counterpart, the DNC maintains a massive database containing information about voters across the country.
The revelation has emerged ahead of the third debate for the Democratic presidential hopefuls that takes place on Saturday.
In the Washington Post’s initial story about the DNC suspension on Thursday night, Sanders’ campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, said that the DNC “is relying on an incompetent vendor [NGP VAN] who on more than one occasion has dropped the firewall between the various Democratic candidates’ data”.
Robby Mook says on a Friday night conference call with reporters that “this was a very egregious breach and our data was stolen”.
The Sanders campaign fired Uretsky over the breach. “They had about 40 minutes where they ran wild”.
The campaign asked “that the Sanders campaign and the DNC work expeditiously to ensure that our data is not in the Sanders campaign’s account and that the Sanders campaign only have access to their own data”.
Weaver said that the issue was brought to the DNC and they were assured it would not happen again.
It was an allegation rejected out of hand by Sanders’ campaign, which filed a federal lawsuit against the DNC seeking to regain access to the voter records.
New Hampshire Party Chairman Ray Buckley said this automatically meant that Sanders would lose access to the more detailed file in the Granite State.
In an interview on CNN, Wasserman Schultz dismissed Weaver’s complaints as “bluster” from a campaign that she says was caught doing the wrong thing. “Their staff stole data from our campaign and they’re now fundraising off it. The situation is very distressing”. “It’s impossible to mobilize the kind of grass-roots campaign we have without that data”.
“That is the only way that we can make sure that we can protect our significant asset that is the voter file and its integrity”, Wasserman Schultz said on CNN. “We don’t know the depth of what they actually viewed and downloaded”.
Three other Sanders campaign employees also accessed the files, the Sanders campaign acknowledged.
Josh Uretsky, the data director fired from Sanders’ campaign, said his team was merely trying to document the security problem and figure out how exposed their own data was by the software patch.
Weaver also noted that while four members of Sanders’ staff accessed the information in some capacity, only one had taken actions that resulted in a fireable offense.
“This data took millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours to build”, said Mook.
“They called me fairly quickly after the breach was closed to inform me that there was something weird going on and that portions of the system were shut down”, he said. “Especially as close as we are to caucuses and primaries, it becomes a serious problem”.
The Sanders campaign has accused the DNC’s punishment as being in line with its other attempts to support Clinton.
Sanders is leading Clinton 48-46 percent in the New Hampshire primary battle in this week’s Franklin Pierce University/Boston Herald poll – but that lead is within the margin of error and Clinton has narrowed the gap.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at a Town Hall rally in Omaha, Nebraska, December 16, 2015.
The political brawl came one day before a debate between the presidential rivals, fuelling rising tensions and highlighting complaints from Sanders and his liberal allies that the DNC is trying to help Clinton, particularly by limiting the number of debates and scheduling them on low-viewership periods like Saturday nights.
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The reaction to the data breach, the depth of which was debated by all involved, tore open an ugly fault line between two camps that had so far engaged in a relatively civil campaign.
