Reports: 4 Sanders Staffers Searched Clinton Data And Saved Files

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks to supporters during an open house at his Iowa campaign headquarters, Saturday, June 13, 2015, in Des Moines, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
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Four members of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) presidential campaign this week conducted searches of data stored by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and saved some of the files, according to reports from the Associated Press and NBC News.

A software glitch in the Democratic National Committee’s database for voter information on Wednesday briefly allowed campaigns to view each other’s data. Though the DNC houses each campaign’s data through its vendor, NGP VAN, typically campaigns cannot view each others’ data.

Computer logs show that Sanders employees conducted 25 searches of Clinton campaign information, according to the Associated Press. The staffers spent 40 minutes searching through Clinton’s data, according to NBC News. The searches conducted by the Sanders campaign suggest that they could access the Clinton campaign’s voter files for 10 early primary states, according to NBC.

NBC reported that the Sanders saved files of Clinton information. Deputy national data director Russell Drapkin was among the staffers who searched for Cilnton data, and he “suppressed” two folders of information after the DNC’s vendor learned of the software bug, according to NBC.

When asked about reports that staffers saved the Clinton campaign’s voter information on Friday, Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said that “no data that I’m aware of was exported in a way that could be used by anybody.”

The Sanders campaign fired its national data director, Josh Uretsky, for inappropriately viewing the Clinton campaign’s data.

Uretsky told MSNBC on Friday afternoon that Sanders staffers only searched for and saved the Clinton campaign’s voter information in order to prove that a breach in the software had occurred. He said that employees “wanted to document and understand the scope of the problem so that we could report it accurately.”

The DNC has temporarily suspended the Sanders campaign from accessing the voter information stored by the DNC.

On Friday, Sanders’ campaign accused the DNC of using the suspension to try to undermine Sanders’ presidential bid and help Hillary Clinton.

“It is our information and the information of all of these volunteers and the people who support our campaign, 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,” Weaver said on Friday. “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.”

Weaver also blamed the DNC and vendor NGP VAN for the data breach and said that a similar incident occurred in October.

“On more than one occasion they have dropped the firewall between the data of competing democratic campaigns. This is dangerous incompetence,” he said.

The DNC defended its decision to suspend the Sanders campaign from voter information on Friday, noting that by accessing Clinton campaign data, the Sanders campaign “violated the agreement that all the presidential campaigns have signed with the DNC.”

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