Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign announced that it regained access to crucial voter data shortly before midnight Friday night.
The Democratic National Committee had suspended that access because at least one Sanders aide had inappropriately viewed data belonging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but backed down shortly before a federal judge was to hear an emergency injunction filed by the Sanders campaign.
“We are extremely pleased the DNC has reversed its outrageous decision to take Sanders’ data,” said Sanders campaign Jeff Weaver in a statement. “Clearly they were very concerned about their prospects in court.”
The moves comes only after the Clinton campaign sharply contested Sanders’ version of events, accusing the democratic socialist’s supporters of stealing their data and then fundraising off the ensuing controversy once caught.
“We’ve had a lot of questions recently about the data breach and we’ve been very concerned about how the Sanders campaign misrepresented what happened,” Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said during a press call on Friday evening. “This was a very egregious breach and our data was stolen … it was not as the Sanders campaign explained ‘a mistake.'”
“If you are so proud of your grassroots organization, tweeted Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon, “you should not need to resort to stealing campaign data.” Fallon added, “They def knew what they were doing. They were trying to get an unfair upper hand against our Iowa ground game.”
They def knew what they were doing. They were trying to get an unfair upper hand against our Iowa ground game. https://t.co/4IDdaBX1Or
— Brian Fallon (@brianefallon) December 19, 2015
The Sanders campaign argued that the data breach was an accident largely the fault of a software vendor hired by the DNC and while they fired the aide caught looking at the data, Weaver and other top Sanders aides suggested party leaders were using it as a pretext to give Clinton an unfair advantage by cutting off access to their own voters files.
Hundreds of thousands of Sanders supporters protested the DNC’s decision to take this action so close to Iowa and New Hamsphire. The Clinton team maintained Sanders wasn’t an innocent victim and was politicizing the episode. An audit is reportedly coming.
Clinton and Sanders will square off along with former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley at the third Democratic presidential debate in New Hampshire Saturday night.
