Bernie Sanders has asked Hillary Clinton to join him in calling on the Democratic National Committee to investigate the firewall failures in their voter data software program.
“As the Clinton campaign knows, this is not the first firewall failure at the DNC,” Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs said in a statement. “There was at least one other failure two months ago that we discovered and reported. Failures like these open the possibility for data access by any campaign.”
The campaign’s call comes just days after the Vermont senator was blocked from the crucial voter list by the DNC for illicitly looking at the Clinton campaign’s data. While the Sanders campaign admitted to this breach and fired the staffer involved, they mostly blamed the breach on the DNC’s software vendor.
The Sanders campaign sued the DNC to regain access to the data and the party relented before the third Democratic debate Saturday.
The Clinton campaign blamed Sanders’ team for the breach, which it called “disappointing,” “totally unacceptable” and a “violation of the law.” Clinton accepted Sanders’ apology during the Democratic debate, but did not join his call for an audit.
Unlike in the Republican Party, where each candidate is in charge of their own voter data, on the Democratic side, the party leadership is responsible for housing and protecting each of the candidate’s individual fundraising voter lists, along with the party’s collective information.
Briggs added, “We hope the Clinton campaign will join us in calling for a thorough, independent investigation starting from Day One in the campaign to review all possible data security failures that may have occurred at the DNC.”
