Bernie Sanders Sues the DNC

“It looks like they are trying to help the Clinton campaign”, he said.

“It’s outrageous to suggest that our campaign “stole” any data”, said Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs.

The controversy over the data breach comes as Sanders was already struggling to draw attention to his economically-focused campaign message after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, shifted the focus of the 2016 campaign to national security.

Weaver also accused the DNC of holding debates on Saturdays to “bury” them in an effort to protect Clinton’s advantage in the Democratic field.

At issue is an extensive trove of voter information maintained by the DNC.

The database includes names, addresses, and past voting habits.

“During this window, over the course of approximately 45 minutes, staffers of the Bernie Sanders campaign inappropriately accessed voter targeting data belonging to the Hillary Clinton campaign”, DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said in a statement released Friday afternoon.

The dispute centers on the DNC’s database on Democratic voters, which is ordinarily partitioned to prevent rival candidates from rifling through opponents’ files.

“We are going to try to make sure that we can get them access to their voter file as quickly as possible”, she said.

Wasserman Schultz said the DNC had asked the Sanders campaign for a “full accounting of whether or not this information was used and the way in which it was disposed”. He added, “It is our information, not the DNC’s”. The lawsuit argued the DNC’s actions have caused Sanders’ campaign “injury and financial losses”.

On CNN, Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon accused the Sanders staffers of acting “like kids in the candy store”. Now what we need to restore confidence in the DNC’s ability to secure data is an independent audit that encompasses the DNC’s record this entire campaign.

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

Although Uretsky was the only staffer fired, The New York Times reported that during the time that Clinton’s data was exposed, searches were carried out by four user accounts associated with the Sanders campaign.

The back-and-forth underscored Sanders’ attempt to cast himself as an anti-establishment upstart willing to take on Clinton, the unquestioned front-runner for her party’s nomination. For Sanders’ supporters, the whole affair reinforces the narrative that the DNC is prematurely throwing its weight behind Clinton.

Mook responded, “It’s not something to be fundraising off of”.

“Unfortunately, yesterday, the vendor once again dropped the firewall between the campaigns for some data”.

The glitch – in which a firewall protecting proprietary data was lowered briefly on Wednesday – made voter data unique to the Clinton campaign viewable for outside eyes.

The Clinton campaign issued a stinging response Friday evening in response to the news that the Sanders campaign had accessed their data. “The data that they reached in and took from our campaign is effectively the strategic road map in those states”.

“We were concerned that large amounts of our data was compromised”, he said. He continued, “We investigated it for a short period of time to see the scope of the Sanders campaign’s exposure and then the breach was shut down presumably by the vendor”.

But she said she said it was “baffling to me that they would be hurling accusations with us” that the Sanders camp would accuse them of being in cahoots with Clinton.