In a blog post on Raw Story, The Young Turk’s Anna Kasparian wrote that the DNC’s action in cutting off the Bernie Sanders’ campaign access to its own voter data this week is nothing short of sabotage to ensure the establishment candidate secures the party nomination. Kasparian said that because of the DNC’s actions favoring Hillary, Clinton has officially lost her vote.
As Sanders continues to gain steam and take leads in polls around the country the Clinton campaign along with the DNC are becoming increasingly worried that Clinton will not take the primaries this coming winter.
As Kasparian points out, the Sanders campaign did nothing wrong and tried to act quickly to resolve the glitch in the system they found that gave the campaign access to Clinton’s information.
“[T]he Sanders campaign noticed a glitch in the database two months ago and brought it to the DNC’s attention. The fact that the problem kept reoccurring and the blame was ultimately placed on the Sanders campaign is egregious to say the least,” wrote Kasparian.
The campaigner, Josh Uretsky, who did access the Clinton data was fired immediately and the Sanders camp has worked with the DNC to resolve the issue ever since.
Sanders’ campaign manager, Jeff Weaver said the glitch is the responsibility of the third party vendor who controls access to the information.
“Two months ago, shortly after our digital vendor that conducts modeling for our campaign told us that there was a failure in the firewall that prevents campaigns from seeing one another’s data. We contacted the DNC and told them about this failure,” Weaver said.
It was “dangerous incompetence and it was our campaign that alerted them that the campaign data was being made available to other campaigns,” Weaver continued.
When the Sanders campaign has gained momentum on their own, vowed to fight a clean election and has held to its word, there is no reason to believe the campaign is guilty of any wrongdoing. Their actions since and their fast action in reporting the leak shows how transparent they were and are being about the situation.
Josh Uretsky, the fired campaigner who reported the leak stood by his actions.
“The breach was in no way our fault. I saw it and attempted to investigate and attempted to do it in a transparent manner,” Uretsky told ABC News. “To my knowledge, we did not take anything out of the system it was in and did not gain anything out of it. We saw a security breach and we tried to assess it and understand it.”
A statement released by the Clinton campaign accuses multiple members of Bernie Sanders’ campaign of accessing their data.
“We were informed that our proprietary data was breached by Bernie Sanders campaign staff in 25 searches by four different accounts and that this data was saved into the Sanders’ campaign account. 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 and that the Sanders campaign only have access to their own data,” Hillary for America National Press Secretary Brian Fallon said in a statement today.
The DNC’s reaction is nothing short of favoritism and shows an extreme lack of credibility when handling an important situation such as this. Why is the DNC hiring a third party vendor that is unable to keep data secure and why is the DNC blaming Sanders’ campaign for this glitch? Did the campaign hide what they found? No, they were open and honest from the get-go and are now being punished for it.
The only reasonable explanation for this response is just what Kasparian finds, the DNC is using this “scandal” to give Clinton the boost she needs to gain leads in key areas that Sanders is dominating.
Yet, the plan may backfire as voters such as Kasparian are not buying the bull and it may cost Clinton important votes.
The Sanders’ campaign threatened to file a lawsuit against the DNC Friday morning demanding access to their voter data and were informed that access would be restored to them by Saturday morning.
