MANCHESTER, N.H. U.S. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and rival Bernie Sanders square off in a potentially combative debate on Saturday, one day after their presidential campaigns erupted in a bitter feud over an improper breach of Clinton voter files by a Sanders staffer.
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The DNC blocked Sanders’, I-Vt, access to the crucial data early Friday after the campaign accessed voter information belonging to rival Hillary Clinton. His campaign filed a lawsuit to get it back and aggressively tried to turn the allegations into a political advantage.
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 White House campaign.
Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told reporters in a conference call the Sanders staff had taken vital data that constituted a “strategic road map” for the campaign’s voter turnout models and strategies. “Sanders’ data. The information we provided tonight is essentially the same information we already sent them by email on Thursday”, said Sanders’ campaign manager Jeff Weaver.
The Sanders campaign said the breach of the confidential files, which contain information such as past voting and donation history, was an isolated incident and blamed it on the DNC’s software vendor, Washington-based NGP VAN, for dropping the firewall between the various Democratic candidates’ data. That fear is sure to intensify if the fight between the Sanders campaign and the DNC escalates.
Josh Uretsky, the Sanders campaign staffer fired for accessing the voter file, told MSNBC that his intent was to document and understand the scope of the problem so it could be reported. Experts said the Sanders campaign employees who accessed it without authorization appear to have broken the law. According to the articles linked to after the jump, the Democratic party establishment intentionally scheduled the debates so that few people would watch them.
The controversy came as Sanders struggled to draw attention to his economically focused campaign message after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, shifted the focus of the 2016 campaign to national security. Clinton, Sanders, and O’Malley have confronted the subject before.
Another liberal group, Democracy for America, rushed to Sanders’ defense. Sanders has been lagging behind Clinton, with 29 percent support to her 60 percent in recent Reuters/Ipsos polling. Tomorrow’s is the second in a row on a Saturday night – easily the worst evening for TV viewership.
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Until now, the debates have been the most visible flashpoint between the DNC and candidates competing against Clinton. “And we respond with crickets, tumbleweeds and a cynical move to delay and limit our own party debates”. And in September, protesters supporting O’Malley and Sanders, including a top O’Malley aide, protested outside the Democratic Party headquarters, demanding more debates.
