Bernie Sanders and the DNC Make Peace for Now

“When we receive this report from the Sanders campaign, we will make a determination on re-enabling the campaign’s access to the system”, he said.

“The loss of access to the Voter Data could significantly disadvantage, if not cripple, a Democratic candidate’s campaign for public office”, the lawyers wrote in their complaint.

The 12-page complaint charged breach of contract over DNC leadership deciding to yank the Sanders’ campaign’s access to the invaluable voter database after a vendor created a security hole that a Sanders staffer – who has since been fired – peeked into.

After four Sanders campaign staffers were accused on Thursday of inappropriately accessing Clinton campaign data, the DNC barred the Sanders from accessing its own all-important voter data.

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”.

It enabled Sanders staffers to view voter data gathered by the Clinton campaign for about 45 minutes.

Summaries of data logs provided to The Associated Press show the Sanders team spent about 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.

Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver had threatened to sue the DNC earlier on Friday, arguing that the committee was holding the campaign’s voter data “hostage” and that suspending the campaign’s access to the file was an “inappropriate overreaction”.

Already, Sanders backers had accused the DNC of limiting the number and prominence of debates between the presidential candidates at the behest of the Clinton campaign. But officials said the vendor that runs the system, NGP VAN, ran a software patch Wednesday that allowed all users to access data belonging to other campaigns.

But the democratic national committee quickly shut out the Sanders’ campaign from its massive data base.

The campaign aide who briefly accessed Clinton’s files was immediately fired after the incident.

“They went hog wild, downloading as much data as they could”, he said.

The Clinton campaign, for its part, applauded the DNC’s move – but called for an independent audit to take place.

So Sanders could use the latest dust-up to try to attack Clinton Saturday night – something he’s been hesitant to do – but even that could have its risk.

As soon as the DNC learned about the data breach, Wasserman Schultz asked the vendor to shut off the Sanders campaign’s access “until the DNC is provided with a full accounting of whether or not this information was used and the way in which it was disposed”.

Ironically, the data dustup and resulting lawsuit and anger may fuel more interest in Saturday night’s debate, scheduled on the last weekend before Christmas and airing opposite a Dallas Cowboys-New York Jets football game. ABC News organized it with the New Hampshire Democratic Party, local ABC affiliate WMUR-TV and Saint Anselm College, where the event was being held.

“The suspension or termination of the Campaign’s access was undertaken without contractual cause, and in contravention of the Agreement’s termination protocols”, the suit says.

Until now, the debates have been the most visible flashpoint between the DNC and candidates competing against Clinton.

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

DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, meanwhile, said in a statement that they only restored the data access after the campaign “complied with the DNC’s request to provide the information that we have requested of them” and indicated that their investigation into the matter was continuing.