Bernie Sanders Sues Democratic Committee Over ‘Datagate’ Feud

The campaign manager for Sanders strongly denied accusations they saved confidential voter information for Democratic rival Hillary Clinton after improperly accessing a protected database.

A staffer at the center of a data breach that has Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign sparring with the Democratic Party says he was simply trying to expose a bug while logging into private files for Hillary Clinton’s camp. The Sanders campaign fired a staffer who did access the information, but it said the vendor was to blame for dropping its firewall and that the party cutoff would unfairly damage Sanders.

Stu Trevelyan, the chief of the vendor NGP VAN, which handles the DNC’s master file of voter data and then disperses it to individual campaigns, told the Washington Post that the breach occurred on Wednesday “while a patch was being applied to the software”.

The DNC announced that it was suspending the Sanders campaign’s access to the national voter file a day after several Sanders staffers accessed voter information that was accidentally released by NGP VAN, a third-party vendor that maintains a database of Democratic voters. Weaver said the Sanders team had noticed in October that files accessed through the DNC contained proprietary information from all three presidential campaigns. It will feature Clinton, Sanders and Martin O’Malley.

“That is the only way that we can make sure that we can protect our significant asset that is the voter file and its integrity”, Wasserman Schultz said on CNN. “Our campaign months ago alerted the DNC to the fact that campaign data was being made available to other campaigns”.

“I think the DNC’s crossed the line and it’s going to open up a whole new part in the campaign season”, said RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United, a liberal group that endorsed Sanders.

“This breach is totally unacceptable and may have been a violation of the law”, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said in a conference call with reporters Friday evening.

“Our primary goal at this moment is to ensure the integrity of the data so that the campaigns – and the entire Democratic Party – can continue the important work we do of connecting with voters on the issues that matter most to them and their families”.

“The DNC is very susceptible and has taken a lot of incoming attacks for being in the tank for Hillary and its response has to be proportional”, he said.

The Sanders camp is recasting the story away from one about a Sanders staffer stealing data and emphasizing the alleged overreaction as proof that the DNC is in the tank with Clinton.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, DNC chair, seemed unfazed by the threat of legal action.

Reports said Sanders aides accessed the data, which is maintained by a vendor for the DNC.

That decision infuriated Weaver, who said the party had cut Sanders’ team off from the “lifeblood of any campaign”.

The Vermont senator’s campaign sent out a fundraising email Friday afternoon that called on supporters to sign a petition calling on the DNC to return the data back to Sanders. “We don’t need dirty tricks”. “It is our information, not the DNC’s”. Uretsky, in an interview Friday with MSNBC, said he knew the DNC would be able to discover what he was doing, and that was exactly the point – to prove there was a problem.