Bernie Sanders’ campaign has been accused of culling Clinton voter data when the vendor, NGP VAN, had a data breach and some of Bernie’s staffers were able to see some of the data for about 40 minutes.

Of course, since there was no firewall during that 40 minutes, everyone could see everyone else’s data. The DNC, headed up by Clinton boot-licker Debbie Wasserman Schultz, decided to penalize Bernie’s campaign.

NGP VAN released a statement this morning which reads in part (emphasis added by me):

Here’s what happened.

On Wednesday morning, there was a release of VAN code. Unfortunately, it contained a bug. For a brief window, the voter data that is always searchable across campaigns in VoteBuilder included client scores it should not have, on a specific part of the VAN system. So for voters that a user already had access to, that user was able to search by and view (but not export or save or act on) some attributes that came from another campaign.

The timing of the DNC’s decision is particularly interesting since yesterday, Thursday, Bernie had just received endorsements from the largest media union in the country, as well as the first and only endorsement ever from Democracy For America AND since Sanders has been receiving record donations from well over 2 million people. (Not even Barack Obama accomplished what Bernie is accomplishing.)

Bernie Sanders’ campaign had informed DNC about several NGP VAN data breaches in the past and were “panicky” because their campaign data was being exposed as well. In an interview with CNN Bernie Sanders’ campaign informed the DNC in October:

“This wasn’t the first time we identified a bad breach,” he said, confirming to CNN that the Sanders campaign reported another breach to the DNC in October. “We reported it to them. They thanked us for reporting it and they told us the breach had been closed.”

“In retrospect, I got a little panicky because our data was totally exposed, too,” Uretsky said of how he handled the latest breach. ” We had to have an assessment, and understand of how broad the exposure was and I had to document it so that I could try to calm down and think about what actually happened so that I could figure out how to protect our stuff.”

So we know that Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been doing everything that she can to sabotage Bernie’s campaign. And this action today, is the latest in a long line of shenanigans.

Bernie’s campaign responds most decisively saying, among other things

Clearly, that while the information was made available to our campaign because of the incompetence of the vendor, it should not have been looked at. Period. Rather incredibly the leadership of the DNC has used this incident to shut down our ability to access our own information. Information which is the lifeblood of this campaign.

This is information about OUR supporters, OUR volunteers, the lists of people we intend to contact in Iowa and New Hampshire and elsewhere. This is information we have worked hard to obtain. This is information gathered by our volunteers across the country. Funded by the over 2 million individual contributions we have received.

It is OUR information… NOT the DNC’s.

In other words, by their action, the leadership of the Democratic National Committee, is now actively attempting to undermine our campaign. This is unacceptable.

Individuals in the DNC can support Hillary Clinton any way that they want. But they are not going to sabotage our campaign; one 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 grassroots campaign we will be in Federal Court this afternoon seeking immediate relief.

 

WATCH the entire news conference here:

 

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