US Election Campaign: Bernie Sanders campaign punished over Clinton snooping

His campaign’s relationship with the party establishment has always been strained – and spats like Sanders’ criticism of the DNC’s limited debate schedule, which Clinton’s challengers view as created to shield the front-runner, have spilled into the open.

Records show that during a 40-minute span that began at 10:40 a.m. on Wednesday, four Sanders staffers sifted through the Clinton campaign’s data and conducted 25 specialized searches, according to a person familiar with the breach.

“This was not an inadvertent glimpse into our data and it was not, as the Sanders campaign has described it, a mistake”, Mook said.

Sanders’ campaign said in a statement the breach of the files, which contain voter information such as past support and donation history, was an isolated incident, media reports said. The database is a goldmine of information about voters and being blocked from it could complicate Sanders’ outreach efforts.

” … In the heat of these campaigns, young people make misjudgments”, says Jeff Weaver, Sanders Campaign Manager. He said the actions of the Sanders staff members involved “may have been a violation of the law”.

The standoff came in the backdrop of Saturday night’s Democratic presidential debate, where Sanders will face off against front-runner Hillary Clinton. “By their action, the leadership of the Democratic National Committee is now actively attempting to undermine our campaign”, Weaver said. Sanders’ campaign said its access was restored Saturday morning. It’s the second Democratic debate to be held on a Saturday night, with the audience likely to be smaller than the viewership that would tune in on a weeknight, when Republicans have so far held their debates.

“The bottom line is we need an independent audit, so that we can have an objective analysis of exactly what happened”, she said in Manchester.

“The Sanders campaign has now complied with the DNC’s request to provide the information that we have requested of them”.

“They’ve been sabotaging Bernie’s campaign all along”, said RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United, an 185,000-member union backing Sanders.

Josh Uretsky, the data director fired from Sanders’ campaign, said his team was merely investigating the security problem and trying to figure out how exposed the software patch left their own data. The petition accuses the “Democratic Party elite” of preferring a “coronation” over a “competitive campaign”.

The DNC has suspended Sanders from using the system, essentially blinding the campaign as it heads into the Democratic debate in New Hampshire on Saturday.

Meanwhile, in addition to fundraising off the dustup, the Sanders campaign seems intent on leveraging the controversy to their political advantage as well.

Sanders supporters and liberal groups have reacted to the news of Sanders’ campaign being punished by questioning the neutrality of the DNC, hinting that the body is in the tank for Clinton. But he accused the DNC of overreacting to the breach by suspending the Sanders’ campaign’s ability to access information it has gathered about its own supporters.

Bernie Sanders’ campaign went to war with the Democratic Party on Friday, an extraordinary step for an underdog campaign struggling to win the presidential nomination.

The campaigns then add their particular information collected by field workers and volunteers; when the program is functioning right this information, can’t be obtained by other campaigns. “The data that they reached in and took from our campaign is effectively the strategic road map in those states”.

The information breach came through the NGP VAN, which allowed a short window of time for access to crucial voter ID statistics.

During the debate, Clinton could choose to play down the issue in the way that Sanders did with his dismissal of questions about Clinton’s email use.