Updates from the third Democratic debate of the 2016 presidential campaign

It didn’t take long for the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s voter data to come up in Saturday night’s Democratic debate, as Bernie Sanders denounced the Democratic National Committee for “arbitrarily” shutting off his campaign’s access to the database, while also apologizing to Clinton.

“We will get access to all the internal communications of the DNC where we can demonstrate what I think most people think is going on, which is that there are some people in there who are clearly trying to help the Clinton campaign”, he said.

In response to the harsh rebuke, the Sanders campaign charged Friday morning that the DNC was “actively attempting to undermine our campaign” in favor of Clinton.

Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook called Sanders’ team’s actions “incredibly disappointing” on a call with reporters, playing up the significance of what Sanders’ campaign had accessed.

In the first debate of the Democratic presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders dismissed concerns about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account and server while she served as secretary of state, saying Americans were exhausted of talking about her “damn emails”.

Saturday’s debate was the first for Democrats since the shooting in San Bernardino, California, where 14 people were killed by a married couple that authorities say had been radicalized. These included the still unanswered questions about why Sanders’ campaign initially claimed the incident was an accident (Palmieri notes that the access would require some degree of legwork).

“I’m expecting to see what we’ve always seen”, Clinton supporter Ryan Richman said.

The DNC said it would restore access Saturday.

Hillary Clinton is setting her sights on Republicans rather than her primary opponents in the third Democratic presidential debate. At the last debate, just one day after the Paris attacks, Sanders didn’t seem comfortable discussing national security issues, though he and O’Malley did succeed in pushing Clinton on how she would differ from the Obama administration on foreign policy.

The DNC moved to deny the Sanders campaign access to the party’s 50-state voter file, which contains information about millions of Democrats, following a data breach by one of Sanders’ staff members who gained access to proprietary information from Clinton’s campaign.

Before the data breach, the week had gone well for Sanders, who broke a record by reaching two million mostly small donations.

“There is no data that we are aware of that is in the possession of our campaign or in the possession of our staffers”, Jeff Weaver said in an interview with CBS News’ Julianna Goldman on Saturday.

The Democratic National Committee maintains a trove of voter information. Sanders has flirted with attacking Clinton more directly but ultimately has backed away from that approach to keep his promise to run a positive campaign.

But for all the bluster Friday, Clinton could choose to downplay the issue entirely once on the debate stage – as Sanders did with his dismissal of questions about her use of email. Yet if Clinton is aggressive in taking on Sanders over the data breach, she could risk alienating his passionate liberal voters, whom she would need to win in a general election.