Sanders, US Democrats reach deal after data breach uproar

Campaign Manager Jeff Weaver threatened to file a lawsuit during a press conference Friday afternoon. An additional four usernames allegedly ran searches while data from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign was exposed.

The reaction of the Democratic National Committee to the data breach, the depth of which was debated by all involved, thrust into the open long-standing suspicions among Sanders and his supporters that the national party is unfairly working to support the candidacy of its front-runner. “They are not going to sabotage our campaign-one of the strongest grassroots campaigns in modern history”.

The Democratic race for president unexpectedly exploded with rancor Friday as Hillary Clinton’s campaign accused rival Bernie Sanders of stealing millions of dollars worth of information about potential voters.

For a quick refresher, there was a technical problem that led to the Sanders campaign being able to access Hillary Clinton’s voter data.

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

He said he may have overreacted, as this was not the first time there had been an issue with the database. On more than one occasion, the vendor has dropped the firewall between the data of different Democratic campaigns.

With the Democratic Party on the verge of all-out warfare, the Sanders team filed a 12-page lawsuit with the US Court for the District of Columbia against the DNC over breach of contract on Friday.

Mook also blasted the Sanders campaign for “politicizing” the incident and fundraising off of the DNC’s decision to revoke access to the database.

First an explanation of the data breach: Like its Republican counterpart, the DNC maintains a massive database containing information about voters across the country.

“The loss of DNC support could significantly disadvantage, if not cripple, a Democratic candidate’s campaign for public office”, the lawsuit said. On Thursday evening, the DNC reacted by cutting Sanders off until his staff could prove they had deleted or destroyed any information they might have obtained.

Firewalls are put in place to prevent campaigns from looking at data in the DNC database maintained by their rivals.

In the meantime, outside groups that support Sanders are also considering ways to aid his campaign.

“If the shoe were on the other foot and the Clinton campaign had accessed the proprietary information of the Sanders campaign, I’m sure that they would expect me to react in the same way that I did, with the same consequences”. “The situation is very distressing and we want it remedied right away”.

The DNC and the Clinton campaign say that the Sanders’ campaign has only itself to blame. “But the DNC, in an inappropriate overreaction, has denied us access to our own data”, Weaver charged. It’s a battle over the future of the Democratic Party with Sanders representing a progressive wing disenchanted with Clinton and a party establishment it feels is enabling her.

The DNC’s decision is a blow to the Sanders campaign just weeks ahead of the February 1 Iowa caucus. The Democratic committee blamed NGP VAN for the software glitch.

“This is unacceptable”, said Weaver. Only the Sanders campaign took advantage of the lapse, according to The New York Times.

Stu Trevelyan, chief executive officer of DNC software vendor NGP VAN, acknowledged the breach in a statement and called it a “brief isolated issue” that was fixed and is now being reviewed.

A person familiar with the matter told CNN that Josh Uretsky, the Sanders campaign’s national data director, was sacked for accessing the voter data.

DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida described the incident as an unfortunate mishap, calling it an “incident (that) briefly allowed users on the NGP VAN system to inadvertently access some data belonging to other campaigns”.