Sanders’ Campaign Files Lawsuit Against DNC

And it comes just over 24 hours away from the party’s final presidential debate of the year, which itself has generated controversy.

Neil Sroka, spokesman for Democracy for America, which endorsed Sanders Thursday, said his organization is looking into ways it can help Sanders, including possibly buying access to a database from NGP VAN, which sells voter information to Democratic and progressive campaigns and selling it to the Sanders campaign.

NGP VAN determined that only the Sanders campaign had potentially accessed confidential data. Politico called the suspension of the Sanders database a “potentially crippling blow” to his campaign, and Weaver accused the Democratic Party of trying to “sabotage” the campaign of Clinton’s biggest challenger. “It is our information, not the DNC’s”. In a statement posted to the campaign’s website, Weaver said the DNC was demonstrating “incompetence”.

Sanders’ supporters are painting this as another instance of the party establishment working against Sanders and favoring his rival Clinton.

DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz weighed in with a statement of her own. This is information that we have worked hard to obtain. “But apparently they are not competent in terms of maintaining the security of data between campaigns”.

“This is not simply a list of names and contact information”. “This is taking our campaign hostage”, Weaver said of the DNC’s action.

The battle is the latest in a long-simmering feud between the DNC and the insurgent Sanders’ campaign. “It is the key to our campaign and our strategy”.

“This is unacceptable”, he said. But Mook said four staffers were involved.

“We are asking that the Sanders campaign and the DNC work expeditiously to ensure that our data is not in the Sanders campaign’s account”, Fallon said.

The Bernie Sanders campaign has hit a rough patch: The Democratic National Committee has locked campaign staffers out of the data bank of potential voters.

“However, the damage to the campaign’s political viability, as a result of being unable to communicate with constituents and voters, is far more severe, and incapable of measurement”, Sanders’ attorneys wrote. Furthermore, there are questions about why the campaign is being penalized for what appears to be a vendor error. No data was exported in a way that could be used by anyone, he said. It was not, as the Sanders campaign has described it, a mistake. “They made an active effort to search it and retain it”. “To do that, we need our data which has been stolen by the DNC”. “We deliberately conducted that investigation in a way that we knew was tracked to make it clear that our intention was to be above board and transparent”, he said. The database, maintained by the national party and rented out to national and state campaigns, is a critical part of a campaign’s field program. It’s more or less an open secret.

The DNC computers store data for all the presidential campaigns; a glitch allowed the “violation”.

Weaver did not deny that someone on their campaign staff accessed the information improperly, but he disputed that the information was downloaded for the purposes of reviewing it later.

Even before the lawsuit was filed, Sanders’ campaign sent a fundraising email to supporters that said his “quick rise in the national polls (has) caused the Democratic National Committee to place its thumb on the scales in support of Hillary Clinton’s campaign”. This is not acceptable. “And we respond with crickets, tumbleweeds and a cynical move to delay and limit our own party debates”. It is “effectively the strategic road map for all the states they took our data from”. “I hope they will agree to that”.

Trevelyan called the bug “a brief isolated issue, and we are not aware of any previous reports of such data being inappropriately available”.