The former data director for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)’s presidential campaign said Friday that staffers for the campaign accessed and saved voter information from opponent Hillary Clinton in order to prove to the Democratic National Committee that their voter information system had been breached.
In a phone interview, Josh Uretsky told MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki that the Sanders staffers “wanted to document and understand the scope of the problem so that we could report it accurately.” Uretsky was fired Friday after news of the breach broke.
He said that he and other staffers accused of accessing the confidential information “knew that what we were doing was trackable” and they did not “use it for anything valuable.”
The DNC has temporarily suspended the campaign’s access to all of their voting records, a move that the Sanders camp has vowed to fight in federal court if it continues.
In the interview, Kornacki pressed Uretsky to justify the search of Clinton’s voter files.
“If you went into her voter files, if you searched them, if you copied information from them, it basically sounds like you are telling me you are committing, crime is a strong word here, but you are committing the misdeed to prove it’s possible to commit the misdeed,” Kornacki said.
Uretsky replied that the campaign didn’t “take custodianship” of the information and offered an analogy to explain the situation.
“Somebody leaves the front door open and you left a note inside the front door saying you left the door open. Then maybe you went and checked the side door, too, to make sure that door was closed,” Uretsky said.
Watch video of the interview via Kornacki’s Twitter feed below:
Josh Uretsky, the now ex-Sanders staffer fired over the voter database breach, just did this interview with me: https://t.co/9qppznUpRa
— Steve Kornacki (@SteveKornacki) December 18, 2015
