Bernie Sanders campaign sues Democratic Party, claiming ‘sabotage’

Summaries of data logs provided to the AP show the Sanders team spent almost an hour in the database reviewing information on Clinton’s high-priority voters and other data from almost a dozen states, including first-to-vote Iowa, New Hampshire and SC.

The Democratic race for president unexpectedly exploded with rancor Friday as Hillary Clinton’s campaign accused rival Bernie Sanders of stealing millions of dollars worth of information about potential voters.

“The DNC, in an inappropriate overreaction, has denied us access to our own data”, Weaver said. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Josh Uretsky, the former National Data Director for the Sanders campaign confirmed on MSNBC (at 5:47), and also on CNN, regarding the previous incident: “it wasn’t actually within the VAN VoteBuilder system, it was another system”.

“In this case it looks like they are trying to help the Clinton campaign”, Weaver said at a news conference, accusing the DNC of taking the Sanders campaign “hostage”.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, sought the “immediate restoration” the campaign’s access to the voter database. While those security measures were temporarily disabled, four of Sanders’ campaign staffers allegedly snooped on the Clinton campaign’s private files in the system.

“The DNC did not send the Campaign any written notice of termination, much less afford the Campaign the contractually required ten-day period in which to cure any default”, the lawsuit said.

“I believe that I took appropriate steps to audit and assess the security breach and that nothing I did was done in a way that it would give the Sanders campaign a competitive advantage”, Uretsky said in an email to The Associated Press. For a brief window, the voter data that is always searchable across campaigns in VoteBuilder included client scores it should not have, on a specific part of the VAN system. “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 grass-roots campaigns in modern history”, Weaver said in a statement.

DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz strongly defended the position of the party’s governing body, saying the Sanders campaign had known what it was doing.

Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said the campaign was “informed that our proprietary data was breached by Sanders campaign staff in 25 searches by four different accounts and that this data was saved into the Sanders’ campaign account”.

Weaver said that the campaign is “fairly confident” that their data was accessed by other campaigns in October.

“Sadly, the vendor who runs the DNC’s voter file program continues to make serious errors”.

The Sanders campaign will remain suspended until it provides the DNC with a full explanation of the episode and provides proof that any accessed data has been discarded.

The Washington Post was the first to report the incident.

Ethan Roeder, Barack Obama’s data director in 2008 and 2012, said the biggest problem created by being barred from the database is the fact that Sanders’ volunteers will not be able to use the voter file to make calls and knock on doors for at least the next few days.

Sanders supporters and liberal groups have reacted to the news of Sanders’ campaign being punished by questioning the neutrality of the DNC, hinting that the body is in the tank for Clinton. “But we are determined to win this campaign and we’re going to win this campaign by talking about the issues that are important to the American people”. “We need to be sure that the Sanders campaign no longer has access to our data”.