The moderators of the debate, conducted by ABC News, will no doubt try to get the two candidates to renew the dispute on the stage at the debate, where Sanders already had signaled his intention to turn up the heat on Clinton on foreign policy issues.
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The about-face came late on Friday night as a deadline neared for a hearing on a motion for an emergency injunction which the Sanders campaign sought after he sued the party in U.S. District Court in Washington.
Sanders extended the olive branch after one of his staffers was sacked this week for improperly accessing Clinton campaign voter data.
In response to the harsh rebuke, the Sanders campaign charged Friday morning that the DNC was “actively attempting to undermine our campaign” in favor of Clinton.
The feud between the DNC, the Sanders and the Clinton campaigns occurred a day before the third presidential debate is set to take place Saturday evening in New Hampshire.
But by firing his top data staffer and admitting that members of his staff looked at information that belonged to the Clinton campaign, Sanders also threatened to undercut his image as an honest broker seeking to foster a “political revolution” to help the nation’s poor and beleaguered middle class.
DNC officials said they restored the campaign’s database privileges after satisfactorily answering some of the party’s questions about the incident.
“The Sanders campaign stole data from our campaign”, Mook said.
“The Sanders campaign has agreed to fully cooperate with the continuing DNC investigation of this breach”.
The glitch – in which a firewall protecting proprietary data was lowered briefly on Wednesday – made voter data unique to the Clinton campaign viewable for outside eyes. She’s ready for a nationally televised debate tonight on ABC.
Sanders is fighting to stay relevant in a race that’s moved away from his message – you could even say his obsession.
But in an interview with the Burlington Free Press on Saturday evening, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz also suggested Sanders’ campaign staff had failed him and slammed Sanders’ lawsuit against her organization as “frivolous”.
The fundraising email, penned by Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager, went out to the campaign’s fundraising list Friday afternoon.
Summaries of data logs provided to AP show the Sanders team spent about an hour in the database reviewing information on Clinton’s high-priority voters and other data from almost a dozen states, including first-to-vote Iowa, New Hampshire and SC.
Josh Uretsky, the fired Sanders campaign staffer, told CNN he did not spy on the Clinton campaign and that his intent was to identify the problem so it could be reported and fixed. Bernie Sanders threatened to escalate into open war this week after the DNC locked Sanders’ campaign out of a crucial database of Democratic voters.
The Clinton campaign did not respond to a request for comment. Yet if Clinton is aggressive in taking on Sanders over the data breach, she could risk alienating his passionate liberal voters, whom she would need to win in a general election.
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Throughout his insurgent bid for the White House, Sanders has cast himself as being above politics as usual.
