Sanders’ Campaign Penalized After Breaching Clinton Voter Data

The breach of Democratic National Committee files led to the firing of a top Sanders data staffer and prompted the DNC to cut off the Sanders campaign’s access to its voter data. Weaver said the Sanders team had noticed in October that files accessed through the DNC contained proprietary information from all three presidential campaigns. The DNC blocked the campaign from the resource Friday after a Sanders staffer accessed data collected and organized by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The Sanders campaign employees who accessed the Clinton voter information without authorization appear to have run afoul of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, said Jason Weinstein, a former supervisor of the Justice Department’s computer crimes section. “We are, because of the nature of our campaign, peculiarly affected by this type of taking of data hostage by the DNC”. But I think if you look at a pattern of conduct, we obviously have concern about the Saturday night debate schedule and its impact on the ability of campaigns to get their message out. National Nurses United, a union that endorsed Sanders, announced it would be protesting outside the Florida district office of DNC Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

Speaking to the press, Sanders’ campaign manager Jeff Weaver admitted that a campaign worker accessed Clinton voter files on Wednesday, due to a brief software glitch.

“We are running a clean campaign”, Weaver said. “We don’t need dirty tricks”.

Weaver said that four members of the campaign had accessed the information, but that only the actions of Uresky had risen to the level of a fireable offense.

Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs placed the blame for the incident in large part on the software vendor, NGP VAN.

“To my knowledge, we did not export any records or voter file data that were based on those scores”, he said.

Uretsky, who could not be reached immediately by Reuters for comment, told CNN he was not trying to take data from Clinton’s operation but that he knew there was a security problem and wanted to determine the vulnerability of his candidate’s own data.

He called for an independent audit of the DNC’s mishandling of the data and its security from the beginning of the campaign, including the incident in October.

The Washington Post first reported late Thursday that the Sanders camp acknowledged a low-level staffer viewed Clinton campaign voter data and was sacked as a result. Suspension from the database hurts a campaign’s field operations because it helps canvassers determine which streets to target for voters. The company said the Sanders campaign saved a “one page-style report containing summary data”. “We are working with our campaigns and the vendor to have full clarity on the extent of the breach, ensure that this isolated incident does not happen again, and to enable our campaigns to continue engaging voters on the issues that matter most to them and their families”. The most recent RealClearPolitics polling data shows Clinton favored in the lead for the Democratic nomination, with 55.9 percent of national support to Sanders’ 30.7 percent.

“It is a temporary measure until they can confirm that they are not still in possession”, Fallon said.