Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager accused theDemocratic National Committee of trying to «undermine» the Vermont senator’s White House bid, as the party’s decision to suspend Sanders’ access to a voter database roiled the presidential campaign on the eve of the latest debate.
The DNC suspended Sanders’ access to the party’s voter database after four of the Vermont senator’s staffers accessed data belonging to rival Hillary Clinton’s campaign, one of whom, Josh Uretsky, the campaign’s national data director, was fired.
Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager, pledged to to take the DNC to federal court if it doesn’t lift the suspension on the campaign from accessing its own voter data.
«The leadership of the Democratic National Committee is now actively attempting to undermine our campaign,» he said at a Friday news conference. «It’s impossible to mobilize the kind of grass-roots campaign we have without that data. We are, because of the nature of our campaign, peculiarly affected by this type of taking of data hostage by the DNC.»
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, DNC chairwoman, said the Sanders campaign «unfortunately doesn’t have anything other than bluster at the moment.» She said the only way to analyze the breach is to suspend their ability to access the database. The DNC is conducting an audit and has sought information the Sanders campaign has refused to provide, she said. The sooner that happens, she said, «the quicker we’ll be able to get them access (to the voter file),» she told CNN.
Brian Fallon, Clinton’s national press secretary, said the campaign was informed its proprietary data was breached by Sanders campaign staff in 25 searches by four different accounts. The data, he said, was saved into the Sanders’ campaign account.
«We are asking 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,” Fallon said in a statement.
The database contains nationwide information about voters, and the breach took place after NGP VAN, the technology company that runs the database that helps set campaign strategies, experienced a technical glitch on Wednesday, The Washington Post first reported.
«This was an isolated incident, and we’re conducting a full audit to ensure the integrity of the system and reporting the findings to the DNC,» Stu Trevelyan, NGP VAN’s chief executive, told The New York Times.
A staffer who viewed the data was fired and Weaver said more disciplinary action may follow. NGP VAN corrected the breach after the Sanders campaign alerted the company to it, according to the DNC.
Michael Briggs, Sanders’ communications director, blamed NGP VAN for repeatedly dropping the firewall between the data of different Democratic campaigns even after the Sanders campaign informed the DNC months ago that the campaign data was being compromised. «At that time our campaign did not run to the media, relying instead on assurances from the vendor,» he said in a statement.
Briggs said the vendor once again dropped the firewall on Wednesday, and after discussion with the DNC, it became clear that a Sanders staffer accessed modeling data from another campaign. Briggs called the behavior «unacceptable.»
«We are as interested as anyone in making sure that the software flaws are corrected since mistakes by the DNC’s vendor also have made our records vulnerable,» Briggs said. «We are working with the DNC and the vendor and hope that this kind of lapse will not occur again.»
Josh Uretsky, the Sanders staffer who was fired, told CNN Friday morning that he was trying to «understand how badly the Sanders campaign’s data was exposed” and he was not trying to access Clinton voter data.
«We knew there was a security breach in the data, and we were just trying to understand it and what was happening,» Uretsky said.
Sanders is due to face Clinton in a Democratic primary debate on Saturday.
