Setback for Sanders’ campaign

Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said the breach was accidental, fired the staffer, and threatened to go to court if access to the data was not restored.

A nasty dispute between the Democratic National Committee and Bernie Sanders’ campaign deepened on Friday, as the campaign lashed out at party leaders for blocking its access to voter data and then filed a lawsuit claiming it was “sustaining irreparable injury and financial losses”. Sanders’s campaign fired national data director Josh Uretsky while the DNC blocked the senator’s organization from further access to its information.

Sanders’ lawsuit said voter data is critical to the campaign “but it is especially critical to the Campaign, which has been financed primarily with contributions from individual donors rather than Political Action Committees (“PACs”)”.

“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.

Weaver did not deny that someone on their campaign staff accessed the information improperly, but he disputed that the information was downloaded for the purposes of reviewing it later.

Weaver, the Sanders campaign manager, said of the DNC, “In this case, it looks like they are trying to help the Clinton campaign”.

“We are also looking at the option of an independent audit by a data security firm”, the source said. Though the DNC houses each campaign’s data through its vendor, NGP VAN, typically campaigns can not view each others’ data. “We are announcing today if the DNC continues to hold our data hostage and continues to attack the heart and soul of our grassroots campaign, we will be in federal court this afternoon seeking immediate relief. To do that we are going to need our data, which has been stolen by the DNC”.

“I didn’t believe at the time that I did it that they would believe what I was doing was wrong”, he said in the interview.

Sanders’ campaign made a quick move to contain damage arguing that the vendor running the database made some errors.

“Some of our staffers irresponsibly accessed some of the data from another campaign”.

Even before the lawsuit was filed, Sanders’ campaign sent a fundraising email to supporters that said his “quick rise in the national polls (has) caused the Democratic National Committee to place its thumb on the scales in support of Hillary Clinton’s campaign”.

“We are confident at this point that no campaigns have access to or have retained any voter file data of any other clients; with one possible exception, one of the presidential campaigns”, he said. “Given that it is the DNC’s responsibility to secure the voter data file, the DNC failed in this regard”, the campaign said in a statement released Friday.

“That was spontaneous by the way”, said RoseAnn DeMoro, director of National Nurses United, adding that the union has been canvassing and phone banking for Sanders and will continue to support him and that they will be canvassing in New Hampshire for the debate.

Appearing on CNN’s “Wolf” with Wolf Blitzer Friday, Wasserman Schultz said, “The Sanders campaign has acknowledged that they have inappropriately accessed data to which they were not entitled, proprietary information that was the property of the Clinton campaign”.

“Our team removed access to the affected data and determined that only one campaign took actions that could possibly have led to it retaining data to which it should not have had access”, he said.

“We knew there was a security breach in the data, and we were just trying to understand it and what was happening”, Uretsky told CNN.