“Based on this information, we are restoring the Sanders campaign’s access to the voter file, but will continue to investigate to ensure that the data that was inappropriately accessed has been deleted and is no longer in possession of the Sanders campaign”, Wasserman Schultz said in a statement. “This is unacceptable. Individual leaders of the DNC can support Hillary Clinton in any way they want, but they are not going to sabotage our campaign – one of the strongest grassroots campaigns in modern history”, Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ 2016 Campaign Manager said in a statement.
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Vermont Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ campaign is playing defense after a staffer was accused of accessing a Democratic Party database that was supposed to be off limits.
The dispute comes almost six weeks before the Iowa caucus kicks off the nominating contest, and at a time when Sanders is attempting to gain ground on Clinton, the front-runner.
While Clinton’s campaign launched to a shaky start following revelations about her private email use at the State Department, she rebounded in the fall and now has a commanding lead of 20 points or more in most national polls. One campaign aide insisted to Politico that the DNC “couldn’t have given us a bigger favor”, while Sanders will also apparently be emphasizing his outsider credibility and these problems with the Democratic infrastructure at the presidential debate on Saturday night.
Weaver said if the DNC does not allow Sanders access to its own data swiftly, it will seek relief in federal court as early as Friday afternoon.
Meanwhile, Sanders’ campaign is cut off from the national party’s voter mother lode until it explains what it did and states that all Clinton data has been excised, the DNC said.
Both the DNC and the Sanders campaign claimed victory, saying they had come away with what they wanted in the vicious brouhaha that unfolded late this week. The campaign’s actions amounted to leaving “a sign on the door that the door was open”, Uretsky said.
A person familiar with the matter told CNN the staffer who was sacked for accessing the voter data was Josh Uretsky, the campaign’s national data director.
He said: “This was not an inadvertent glimpse into our data, it was not as the Sanders campaign has described it, as a mistake”.
He said the campaign would have full access to the voter files again on Saturday morning, in time for a weekend of campaigning. Choosing to have the next Democratic debate on a Saturday night is as clear of an indication the the party’s leadership is completely out of touch with reality as there can be.
Uretsky told CNN Friday that he and others on the campaign discovered the software glitch Wednesday and probed the system to discover the extent of their own data’s exposure.
It added “NGP VAN played no role” in making the DNC decision to bar the Sanders campaign.
Hilary campaign manager blatantly rejected the Sanders’ team efforts to make itself look like the victim of a DNC effort to help Clinton win. “But just because you have opportunity doesn’t mean you should take advantage of it, clearly there are staff in their campaign that did”. According to Weaver, other staffers are being interviewed about the data breach.
The vendor was instructed “to identify any users who accessed data, the actions they took in the system, and to report their findings to Party and affected campaigns”. The development has the potential to transform the debate – the third of the race and the last of the year – into something far livelier.
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But for all the bluster Friday, Clinton could choose to downplay the issue entirely once on the debate stage as Sanders did with his dismissal of questions about her use of email. The campaign also will have to provide proof that the data obtained during the breach has been disposed of.
