The moment could provide a boost to Sanders, who has stagnated in the polls as Clinton has bolstered her lead in the polls after delivering solid debate performances and surviving a round of questioning from U.S. House Republicans over the attack at the country’s embassy in Libya.
But there’s risk, too: An audit showed Sanders’ campaign repeatedly accessed sensitive voter information belonging to the Clinton campaign, threatening Sanders’ attempt to commandeer the moral and ethical high ground in the race.
‘Unprecedented’ Punishment
Casting Sanders as the victim, Weaver suggested that it was excessive punishment for what he described as a minor infraction by “young people” who made “misjudgments.” ....
According to an NGP VAN audit of their recent data breach obtained by Bloomberg, multiple NGP VAN users associated with Bernie Sanders’s campaign downloaded and saved lists based on Clinton campaign data during a brief window in which the firewall between campaigns’ data was down on Wednesday.
According to Bloomberg,”Staffers conducted searches that would be especially advantageous to the campaign, including lists of its likeliest supporters in 10 early voting states, including Iowa and New Hampshire.”
That’s a huge deal, and contradicts the Sanders campaign’s original response to the incident.
When the breach was first reported and the campaign saw their voter file access suspended, Sanders’s campaign manager claimed that no information had been saved, and that Clinton data had only been accessed by one “low-level” staffer (who was fired on the spot) and that the campaign immediately notified NGP VAN that there had been a breach. That “low-level” staffer turned out to be Josh Uretsky, the campaign’s now-former national data director, who reportedly shared access with three other members of Sanders’s campaign, including deputy data director Russell Drapkin. Furthermore, while the Sanders campaign had taken the initiative to contact NGP VAN when a similar breach occurred in October, they were not the ones who alerted the vendor to the breach this time around.
http://americablog.com/2015/12/audit-shows-sanders-campaign-downloaded-saved-clinton-data.html
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