“The Democratic National Committee’s decision to attack the campaign that figured out the problem, rather than go after the vendor that made the mistake, is profoundly damaging to the party’s Democratic process”, said Charles Chamberlain, Democracy for America’s executive director.
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The incident has served as an immediate crisis for the Sanders campaign, but also a serious blow to the DNC, calling into question the party’s readiness to tackle the sophisticated modern effort necessary for Democrats to win the White House next year. His campaign filed a lawsuit to get it back and aggressively tried to turn the allegations into a political advantage.
Politico reports that the restoration of access around midnight Friday followed hours of negotiation during which the Sanders campaign agreed to an independent audit of all its data – though both sides are now claiming victory. “They finally gave us the information that we had been asking for so that we could begin to access the depth of the breach where their staff looked inappropriately at unauthorized material that was the proprietary information of the Clinton campaign”.
“We believe this audit should proceed immediately, and, pending its findings, we expect further disciplinary action to be taken as appropriate”, he added.
On Uretsky’s Facebook page, numerous friends had posted messages of support and concern by Saturday morning. If you want to comment on it, you can do that here.
At issue is a database of voter information, with millions of records, that the party makes available to campaigns for a fee, and is the “heart and soul” of modern presidential campaigns, as the Sanders campaign put it. State parties feed the list with information including names, addresses, ethnicity if available, and voting history.
“The campaign acknowledged they improperly accessed information to which they were not entitled, proprietary information for Hillary Clinton – that’s not in dispute”, Wasserman Schultz said. That staffer was ultimately fired.
The DNC has suspended Sanders from using the system, essentially blinding the campaign as it heads into the Democratic debate in New Hampshire on Saturday.
Still, the campaign said it fired a staffer in response to the breach. He added, “It is our information, not the DNC’s”.
The campaign estimated donation losses would be $600,000 a day.
“She comes off as more hawkish on some of her foreign policy ideas”, said Michael Briggs, a spokesman for Sanders.
While Sanders’ aides sought to show themselves as insurgents being unfairly penalized by the establishment, Clinton’s team and its allies used the issue Friday to try to puncture Sanders’ reputation as a different kind of politician.
This was likely an attempt by the Democratic National Committee to smooth Hillary Clinton’s path to the nomination.
That email made no mention of the campaign’s decision to dismiss a staff member and Weaver’s admission that the campaign worker’s actions were “unacceptable”.
Mook responded, “It’s not something to be fundraising off of”.
“Unfortunately, yesterday, the vendor once again dropped the firewall between the campaigns for some data”.
Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver accused the DNC of working to protect Clinton, pointing to the party’s limited debates at low-viewership periods like Saturday nights as another example.
Data director Josh Uretsky was sacked by the campaign.
Advisers to Sanders artfully framed the crisis as one created by the national party, not its renegade staffers. “We are particularly disturbed right now that they are using the fact that they stole data as a reason to raise money for their campaign”.
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Weaver accused party leadership of unfairly locking down information the campaign itself obtained. Stating that they knew there was a security breach in the data, and they were trying to prove the system to understand what was happening and discover the extent of their own data’s exposure.
