Campaign says party committee is ‘holding hostage’ crucial voter information in retaliation for what the Clinton campaign calls Sanders officials’ ‘theft’ of data

Bernie Sanders is suing the Democratic party for $600,000 a day in damages, claiming it breached its contract with the campaign by dramatically removing all access to crucial voter records just weeks before the Iowa caucus.

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A copy of the lawsuit filed with a federal court in Washington reveals that the agreement to use a shared computer system for voter registration and supporter data included a provision for a 10-day notice period for any changes to access.

In response to the Sanders campaign’s expected appearance before a federal judge as soon as Friday night, Brian Fallon, the Hillary for America press secretary, released a statement expressing hope for a swift resolution: “We hope that the court will resolve this matter tonight and the Sanders campaign has access to their voter files right away, with adequate protections of our proprietary information, which we understand could be completed in short order.

“As we stated earlier today, we also want a full, independent accounting of the Sanders campaign’s actions, as well as assurances that no data or strategic insight from this act of intrusion will be used by his campaign. This was an egregious breach of data and ethics.”

It comes as the Democratic National Committee (DNC) immediately suspended all access for the Sanders team to a shared database system as punishment for a data breach in which a number of staff accessed records belonging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign during a software glitch.

The Clinton campaign earlier responded angrily to the breach, claiming the access amounted to “theft” on the part of their rivals and took place through 24 different queries to the database on Wednesday. It also disputed claims by Sanders that no downloads were made.

“This is incredibly disappointing,” Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told reporters. “This is someone who said they were going to run a different type of campaign, and yet stole our data and is fundraising off it.”

However, he declined to be drawn into the fairness of the DNC response, which Clinton staff suggested may simply be to make sure that software vulnerabilities, which temporarily removed a firewall between the two accounts, are not exploited again.

“It’s up to the Sanders campaign and the DNC to work out whether anybody should be punished in one way or another,” added Mook.

The Clinton campaign manager also hesitated when asked if any of his staff had access to Sanders’ records, saying he was sure no one had “reached into Bernie Sanders’ data and extracted it in the way that the Bernie Sanders campaign did this week”.

Earlier, Sanders’ campaign team had claimed the DNC’s crucial voter information was being “held hostage” by party leaders who are “actively trying to undermine” the senator’s presidential campaign.



In a dramatic escalation of a row over Sanders officials accessing voter data belonging to the Clinton campaign, the Vermont senator’s campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, accused the DNC of actively trying to “sabotage” his campaign by denying it all access to the Democratic party’s master voter list as a punishment for the breach.

The DNC insists Sanders’ campaign continues to possess private information from the Clinton campaign. This is vociferously disputed by the Sanders campaign, which claims that it first reported vulnerabilities caused by a faulty software system two months ago.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeff Weaver, campaign manager for Bernie Sanders, talks to the media in Washington on Friday. Photograph: Yuri Gripas/Reuters

In a statement, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz refused to rule out permanently denying the Sanders campaign access to its data. She said she personally reached out to the senator “to make sure that he is aware of the situation”, and that once the DNC receives a full report from his campaign, “we will make a determination on re-enabling the campaign’s access to the system”.

Since the list includes all of the data that has been collected by the Sanders campaign so far, it argues it is now unable to perform all the most basic aspects of voter contact such as knocking on doors and making phone calls in any functional way, leaving its grassroots efforts virtually crippled in the crucial run-up to the Iowa caucus.

Weaver added if the DNC continues to withhold the data, and continues “to try to attack the heart and soul of our campaign”, his team “will be in federal court this afternoon seeking an immediate injunction”.

The vendor in question, NGP VAN, is the dominant provider of software and data for Democratic political campaigns and US progressive causes and has an effective monopoly on supplying voter data to Democratic presidential campaigns. However, the initial vulnerabilities that the Sanders campaign complained about related to a different vendor.

Clinton’s campaign released a statement on Friday saying: “We were informed that our proprietary data was breached by 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.”

The DNC has long been accused of trying to rig the Democratic primary to benefit Hillary Clinton. Only four debates were scheduled before the Iowa caucuses and they have been scheduled for weekend evenings when relatively few voters are home to watch.

In a television appearance afterwards, Schultz, who endorsed Clinton in 2008, dismissed these complaints. “The Sanders campaign doesn’t have anything other than bluster,” she said.

“We are taking on the establishment and I’m sure there are people in the Democratic establishment who are not happy at that,” Weaver added.

Wasserman Schultz amplified her criticism in a statement sent out to DNC members.

“Earlier this week, an incident briefly allowed users on the NGP VAN system to inadvertently access some data belonging to other campaigns,” she said. “During this window, over the course of approximately 45 minutes, staffers of the Bernie Sanders campaign inappropriately accessed voter-targeting data belonging to the Hillary Clinton campaign. At no point were financial information, donor records or volunteer data exposed.”

Wasserman Schultz continued: “Once the DNC became aware that the Sanders campaign had inappropriately and systematically accessed Clinton campaign data, and in doing so violated the agreement that all the presidential campaigns have signed with the DNC, as the agreement provides, we directed NGP VAN to suspend the Sanders campaign’s access to the system 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.”

In a separate statement, the Sanders campaign claimed “the leadership of the Democratic National Committee is now actively attempting to undermine our campaign. This is unacceptable. Individual leaders of the DNC can support Hillary Clinton in any way they want, but they are not going to sabotage our campaign – one of the strongest grassroots campaigns in modern history.

“We are announcing today that if the DNC continues to hold our data hostage, and continues to try to attack the heart and soul of our campaign, we will be in federal court this afternoon seeking an immediate injunction,” it added.

However, the fast-evolving story has led to red faces at the Sanders headquarters, where a senior official – Josh Uretsky, its national data director – who gained access to the Clinton data in question, was fired. Initially, officials claimed he was the only one to have seen the data and did not download anything, but later admitted more than one staffer may have seen the information and only insisted none of it was used to help the Sanders campaign in any way.

One source familiar with the issue said there doesn’t appear to be “any hard evidence that Sanders campaign did in fact scrape or export any data”.

The issue threatens to overshadow the third Democratic presidential debate due to be held on Saturday evening in Manchester, New Hampshire, where Sanders is also expected to go on the offensive over foreign policy.

One DNC member, Heather Mizeur of Maryland, is threatening to resign her position in protest if the Sanders campaign does not regain access to the voter file. Mizeur, a former state legislator and gubernatorial candidate, wrote on her Facebook page: “If the DNC doesn’t reverse its decision to give the Sanders campaign access to its voter file data again, I am ready to resign my post as a Democratic National Committeewoman from Maryland in protest. The DNC is expected to stay neutral and supportive of all candidates during the primaries and their response to this situation is heavy-handed and ill-conceived.”

National Republicans used the opportunity to score political points. Sean Spicer, the chief strategist for the RNC, bragged: “Every candidate has equal access to our superior data file at the RNC because we believe primaries should be a process free from party interference and that puts voters and campaigns first.”

He added: “That’s why it is so troubling to see the DNC engage in such heavy-handed favoritism benefitting Hillary Clinton, a pattern which will continue [Saturday] night with another debate deliberately scheduled to limit viewership.”





