Sanders camp suspends two more staffers over data breach

[Historic NY]

Source: Politico - ABC News.....

Bernie Sanders' campaign suspended two more staffers directly involved in the data breach that has roiled the party, a Sanders aide confirmed to POLITICO after the Democratic debate on Saturday night.

Pending an investigation, the two aides join data director Josh Uretsky in leaving the campaign following the revelation that they accessed and downloaded voter information from Hillary Clinton's team during a technology glitch on Wednesday.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/bernie-sanders-suspends-two-staffers-217007#ixzz3upwoTDy2

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/0fe8ccecb4d84093adda441e7a3c869d/sanders-campaign-suspends-2-more-staffers-after-data-breach





Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/bernie-sanders-suspends-two-staffers-217007

[RandySF]

1. But I thought they did nothing wrong.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

2. I remember back in the 70s when some folks broke into Democratic HQ to take data

We called that "Watergate"

[Cha]

10. Yeah, and I thought they were exaggerating the first night when they compared this to

Watergate.

Really, what's the difference? They should have learned by now it was the coverup.

[DallasNE]

12. But Nobody Broke In To Anything Here

It was the 3rd party software company that made this possible. This was more like someone sitting across the street peering through a window with binoculars after somebody pulled the shades open. And it is at least the 2nd time this software company has crashed the firewall, exposing the data.

No need to make overblown comparisons.

[msongs]

13. more like peering thru binoculars then taking photographs as well nt

[Hortensis]

92. More like stealing a UPS package on a front porch

because it was set out where people could see and quickly grab it.

How on earth could anyone be accused of theft under those conditions? That's so not fair!

You know, Dallas, if the Clinton campaign were the perpetrator here, I would never pretend, much less believe, that illegal and unethical behavior was anything but what it was. Illegal, unethical, and immoral. Those people who knowingly involved themselves are guilty of felonies, even if charges are never brought, which I believe both campaigns emphatically do not want. Their careers as they stand are in shreds; though, there is undoubtedly a large market out there for IT people who are willing to break the law.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

18. Some data was apparantly taken. Some staffers were fired and suspended

The Sanders campaign does not have clean hands here.

[patricia92243]

40. Sounds like they need to change vendors. n/t

[glinda]

76. Ya well the DNC can get on that one. Not.

[MyNameGoesHere]

52. No need to make an under blown one either eom

[PosterChild]

53. That's a poor excuse for ....

..... obviously wrog, obviously unethical behavior.

Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager:

"Clearly, while that information was made available to our campaign because of the incompetence of the vendor, it should not have been looked at. Period"

Sanders communications director Michael Briggs:

"After discussion with the DNC it became clear that one of our staffers accessed some modeling data from another campaign. That behavior is unacceptable, and that staffer was immediately fired."

http://www.npr.org/2015/12/18/460273748/bernie-sanders-campaign-locked-out-of-key-voter-file-after-data-breach

What the Sander's campaign did was unethical and stupid.

[DallasNE]

86. Not Defending What Sanders Staffers Did

It should not have been looked at, period. That would have been the ethical thing. But to compare this to Watergate, which was a planned break-in, is just plain silly. That is all I was trying to point out. We don't have the FBI Director dumping incriminating documents in the Potomac and other serious lawbreaking.

[PosterChild]

88. You are right, this is no Watergate. eom

[Elmer S. E. Dump]

98. You mean what 3 staffers did - Bernie was not involved at all.

So what you said is very misleading - which is your intention, I'm sure.

[PosterChild]

107. You might want to ...

.... read my post more carefully. First, I quoted sander's campaign. And second i agreed with sander's campaign's assement of sander's campaign. Not sanders .

[Elmer S. E. Dump]

108. Sorry, I must be illiterate. Whatever you say.

[PosterChild]

109. In this post and in others....

... on this topic I have been very careful not to accuse Sen. Sanders of complicity in the incident. I thought I had made that clear, so I wanted to make sure it was understood . Sorry if I made too much of it.

[JDPriestly]

20. There is no allegation that Sanders campaign hacked. Or cheated to get into thr

Database but rather that the vendor failed to keep the fireswall up and ySanders employees queried the database. Sanders'campaign manager stated in a video that this kind of breach of the firewall occurred in October and that the Sanders campaign reported it.

The vendor is at fault forr the breach in securitty. Sanders is dismissing people on his staff who were involved to maintain Sanders' high ethical standard.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

24. OK. They didn't hack. If you leave your door open, is it OK for strangers to enter and look around?

I refer you to this article that I also posted in GD: P

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/12/heres-what-actually-happened-great-sanders-clinton-data-theft

Today, however, David Atkins has weighed in [see update below], and he does know how the software is set up. I don't know his loyalties in the presidential race, but he nonetheless seems to have a pretty solid take on the whole thing:

[An] important piece of information to note is the difference between a "saved search" and a "saved list."...You really only want to pull a static list if you're doing something specific like creating a list for a targeted mail piece—or if you want a quick snapshot in time of a raw voter list.

....However, the access logs do show that Sanders staff pulled not one but multiple lists—not searches, but lists—a fact that shows intent to export and use. And the lists were highly sensitive material. News reports have indicated that the data was "sent to personal folders" of the campaign staffers—but those refer to personal folders within NGPVAN, which are near useless without the ability to export the data locally....Even without being to export, however, merely seeing the topline numbers of, say, how many voters the Clinton campaign had managed to bank as "strong yes" votes would be a valuable piece of oppo.

...This doesn't mean that Wasserman-Schultz hasn't, in David Axelrod's words, been putting her thumb on the scale on behalf of the Clinton campaign....Still, the Sanders camp's reactions have been laughable. It was their team that unethically breached Clinton's data. It was their comms people who spoke falsely about what happened. The Sanders campaign wasn't honeypotted into doing it—their people did it of their own accord.... What's very clear is that the Clinton camp did nothing wrong in any of this. Sanders campaign operatives did, and then Wasserman-Schultz compounded it by overreacting. And in the end, the right thing ended up happening: the lead staffer in question was fired, and the campaign got its data access back.

[Squinch]

83. Not only enter and look around, but also steal the grocery money from the counter.

They DID download information.

25 times.

[JDPriestly]

101. I used to work with databases.

Back in the day.

We need an investigation to determine what happened.

There was a basic database and each campaign entered information into it in a separate database of its own.

The vendor was supposed to maintain a firewall between the databases.

My theory is that at some point, the Sanders campaign noticed some data from Hillary's campaign was in the database they had been provided. They weren't sure that was the case, so they ran queries to identify specifically what and how much Hillary data was in their database.

My theory is that they found a lot.

Bernie's employees had previously found a breach in October in that same or another database and had reported it to the DNC, the organization responsible for the hiring and supervision of the vendor responsible for maintaining the firewall and the databases.

Bernie's employees made lists to prove the extent of the mixing of the data so that they could later inform the DNC.

The DNC went to the press before giving the Sanders campaign the required time to work with the vendor and the DNC on repairing the firewall.

This is my theory of what happened based on my past experience with entering information and retrieving information from a database that was large.

This was the vendor's fault and responsibility.

I saw a list of the queries made by Bernie's employees.

They were specifically intended to sort Hillary's information.

In my opinion, based on my experience, if Bernie's employees had wanted to "steal" Hilary's information, they would have made broader queries that did not use Hillary's name but that would gather up a lot of information that would have included Hillary's. Then they could have queried the information for Sanders' specific data and would have seen that the information they got for Sanders was more limited. The information not retrieved during the Sanders query would have been Hillary's.

My theory.

This requires more investigation.

Sanders' campaign has been accused of wrongdoing by Hillary, the DNC and their supporters. Sanders has the right and the responsibility to set the record straight.

[Elmer S. E. Dump]

99. Can we look at the same logs and see if HRC people looked at Bernie data?

They are the ones that kept bringing down the firewall, and I hardly think that was an accident, especially the second time. I want a full independent, non-partisan investigation of this whole mess. Unlike HRC supporters, I am totally and completely confident that Bernie did no wrong. Now, Hillary, of course, is another story. She has a pattern.

[JDPriestly]

102. This has to be thoroughly investigated by an independent committee or agency.

My theory is that Bernie's employees made a general query of the database provided to them and noticed that some of the data belonged to Hillary. They then specifically queried to identify the Hillary data in order to be able to report the breach which was the second breach at the very least of the firewall on databases of the campaigns.

This needs to be thoroughly investigated because it is quite possible that the breach of the firewall went both ways and that Hillary's campaign has Bernie's data. Not a certainty, but a possibility.

The queries by Bernie's staff were, I suspect, done to ascertain that, yes, Hillary's database was mixed in with Bernie's. How else could they prove the problem existed.

[Elmer S. E. Dump]

104. That's what I think 100%. The firewall controls access both ways so it would have been down for HRC.

[notadmblnd]

26. And I remember back in 2008 when somebody inappropriately accessed Barack Obama's data

And guess what? Their initials are HRC. So you might as well get over it or display the same outrage towards her that you do for Senator Sanders.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

28. Hillary isn't outraged. She was fine with Sanders' apology.

He's fired a staffer and suspended two others.

[notadmblnd]

37. As he said he would.

No, the outrage I was talking about is the outrage displayed by her campaign Friday and her supporters here. They're running around like chickens with their heads cut off screaming bloody murder. It's just strange that no one reacted like that in 2008 when the Clinton campaign illegally accessed and stole Barak Obama's data. Why do you think that is?

And if it wasn't a big deal when Hillary did it, why is it a big deal now? But you folks must not be able to acknowledge that little fact because every HRC supporter I've pointed it out to has thus far ignored it. Including you.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

49. Ask David Plouffe

“Think if one company accessed and stole another’s customer data. This is no small thing,” wrote a supporter of Mrs. Clinton, the former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, on Twitter. Mr. Sanders’s camp “should be careful playing the victim.”

http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/12/18/sanders-campaign-disciplined-for-breaching-clinton-data/

[notadmblnd]

73. The Clinton camp should be careful when accusing others of doing what they've done.

Because their dirty laundry might just some out of the hamper too.

I'm no political insider like the GREAT AND POWERFUL David Plouffe. However, my opinion is every bit as valid as his.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

77. Well, he did run a winning Presidential campaign for Barack Obama in 2008

...and he doesn't seem bothered, so no -- your opinion isn't as valid as his.

When a candidate -- any candidate/any party -- sells themselves to the public on themes of honesty and integrity (which - frankly - Hillary did not; meaningful experience is her central theme), then the media will take extra joy in attacking that campaign when there is an integrity stumble. It's no different than when family values conservatives get caught in sexual affairs; the sex part isn't the scandal -- it's the hypocrisy.

In the end, I think this dustup ends in another day or so. The staffers go bye bye, and in the stage will be set for replacing DWS.

[LiberalFighter]

69. I have been unable to find any record that happened in 2008

[notadmblnd]

72. Perhaps take a few moments and read a few threads?

because there's plenty of documentation here.

I'm not the sort of person that just pulls things from where the sun doesn't normally shine and post them to discussion boards.

[yellowcanine]

106. "there's plenty of documentation here. "

The person who makes the claim bears the responsibility for backing it up.
Saying there is documentation without actually linking to it doesn't really cut it. If there is plenty you ought to be able to at least give one example. That is how debate works. Not based on what sort of person you are and what you normally do.

[Historic NY]

3. I'm thinking he's taking charge..

now and he is livid. We will see.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

4. A cynic might suggest that staffers got caught, and are now taking the fall for the boss

If this were a Republican Congressman, for example, DUers might be demanding sworn testimony from the aides on what the Congressman knew and when did he know it.

Fortunately for all involved, Hillary Clinton seems satisfied with the apology and wants to move forward.

[alcibiades_mystery]

5. The first rule of Sanders support

is that Senator Bernard Sanders is a fucking saint and how dare you?

[Cha]

8. Exactly. How dare you?

LOL

[Ed Suspicious]

14. You think the senator was sifting through the database? Not fucking likely.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

19. The Senator? Hell no - that's why he hires staffers.

College kids for gosh sakes. Geeze, a guy as old as Bernie has problems understanding anything more complex than a flip phone - he couldn't hack a database. You hire college kids to do that kind of thing.

[WIProgressive88]

63. Knock it off.

The campaign could have handled this better; I have no problem admitting that. But Sen. Sanders apologized, Hillary accepted, and people are being held accountable. Move on. Why Hillary supporters, who are absolutely convinced their candidate will be the nominee, continue to antagonize voters whose support she will need with this sort of snark is beyond me. You're hurting your candidate.

And to imply that Sen. Sanders somehow encouraged or even ordered this type of behavior, as was done by a different poster above, when absolutely no evidence would suggest that is absolute sleaze. But, I guess, consider the source.

[tabasco]

64. Please, stop with the immaturity and divisiveness.

I say the same thing to fellow Sanders supporters.

[JDPriestly]

22. They are not accused of hacking into Hillary's infi.

There was a breach in the firewall which suggests that the vendor is at fault.

The. Manager of Bernie's campaign explained on a video that a similar breach occurred in October and tthat the Sanders campaign reported it. The queries made were clearly worded,

The vendor did not secure the data roperly it appears.

[PosterChild]

56. Making excuses and playing the victum is not helpful. eom

[Adrahil]

96. I'm a Hillary supporter, but I don;t believe that.

I think Sanders is genuine and would not support such a thing.


OTOH, the massive VICTIM card played by Sanders supporters here on Du is being shown to be a festering pile of poo.

Good on Bernie to owning up to and apologizing for a misdeed.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

103. I'm willing to accept the apology and move on

However, I've come to seriously question whether Sanders supporters would support Hillary in the event that she gets the nomination. I'm hoping I'm wrong, but I'm getting that "Gore is the same as Bush" vibe from Sanders supporters. Hopefully, I'm wrong, and that we'll all come together around whomever the Dems nominate against Cruz, Rubio, or Trump. That said, I'm sick to death of hearing that the Clintons are the enemy.

[joshcryer]

6. As I said he has to clean up the mess.

The two days of escalation by his campaign was not what Bernie wanted and was totally idiotic. I don't think he'll can Weaver now though but I do think the lawsuit is going to be dropped by Monday.

[JDPriestly]

23. If the fire wall had been properly maintained by the vendor, Bernie's team could

Not have queried Hillary's dara.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

25. It doesn't matter. They did query the data

They apparently got caught.

Or does the Senator just fire and suspend staffers for the Hell of it?

[PosterChild]

54. Blaming others and playing the victum . ...

..... is very disengenious. At this point only an apology is appropriate and only an audit is necessary .

Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager:

"Clearly, while that information was made available to our campaign because of the incompetence of the vendor, it should not have been looked at. Period"

Sanders communications director Michael Briggs:

"After discussion with the DNC it became clear that one of our staffers accessed some modeling data from another campaign. That behavior is unacceptable, and that staffer was immediately fired."

http://www.npr.org/2015/12/18/460273748/bernie-sanders-campaign-locked-out-of-key-voter-file-after-data-breach

[JDPriestly]

90. That the behavior of one of Sanders' employees was unacceptable to Sanders does not mean

that the vendor is off the hook.

The vendor allowed a breach of Hillary's data to occur that placed Hillary's information into a database that Sanders' employees could query.

There is most likely a contract between the DLC and the vendor that defines the duties of the vendor. The DLC should have and probably did have a provision in that contract that required the vendor to protect the integrity of each candidate's data and required the vendor to secure and maintain a firewall between the candidates' accounts and information.

It is the likely and apparent breach of that provision that I presume would have been in that contract that CAUSED the problem.

The vendor is most likely responsible for the breach of Hillary's information.

That Sanders requires his staff to meet high standards and not take advantage of such a breach is Sanders decision and demonstrates the high standard for integrity and honesty to which Sanders holds his employees.

Hopefully we will see an independent and thorough investigation with broad discovery in this situation so that the relationship if any between Hillary supporters, the DNC and the DNC's vendors will be examined.

[PosterChild]

91. Ultimately , the only thing that protects the integrity of a system....

..... is the integrity of those who are using it. So let's not lose sight of what the real problem is here.

[JDPriestly]

93. You mean Debbie Wasserman-Schultz who had to quickly back down from her draconian

punitive measures against Sanders after making her untrue and wild announcement to the press.

Sanders sued; Debbie ducked. That's what happened.

[PosterChild]

94. No, I mean . ...

.... the unethical idiots on sander's team. There is no excuse for it and there is no moral equivication with anyone else's actions in this fiasco. The sooner you lose the defensiveness, the sooner you stop playing the victim, the sooner you stop trying to excuse the stupid, the better off all of us democrates will be.

In the debate, Sanders said: “Not only do I apologize to Secretary Clinton . . . I want to apologize to my supporters. This is not the type of campaign that we run.”

Clinton responded: “We were distressed when we learned of it . . . [but] we should move on because I don’t think the American people are all that interested in this. I think they’re more interested in what we have to say about all the big issues facing us.”

http://wapo.st/1Qye8wU

That should be the end of it.

[JDPriestly]

95. Debbie Wasserman-Schultlz hired a contractor or vendor to provide security for the candidates'

databases. I presume that there is a contract between the DNC and that vendor.

I assume that either explicitly or implicitly that contract imposes on that vendor the duty to maintain the security of Hillary's database, of the databases of each and every candidate using the system.

That vendor appears to have failed to maintain that security.

It is the breach of that duty to maintain that security that appears to be the problem here, not bad intentions on the part of any of the candidates' campaigns.

That is the problem in a nutshell.

Sanders' employees could not have queried Hillary's database had the vendor protected the security of that database as the contract we can presume required.

If Hillary has a problem,, she needs to talk to the vendor.

Bernie is suing the DNC for violating the contract terms under which his data was provided to the vendor of the DNC when Debbie Wasserman-Schultz denied Bernie the use of his database for a time in violation of the terms of the contract.

That is my understanding from what I have read in articles. I have not seen the contracts, but the terms I describe would have been routine, normal contract terms.

Hope this helps you understand the parties' positions a little better.

This is a contract case. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz did not take her accusations to the police for a reason.

[PosterChild]

97. You are not only beating a dead horse....

.... it's your own horse your beating. Time to move on.

[JDPriestly]

100. Hillary supporters would love to move on.

Funny how that works.

Sanders did nothing wrong and has nothing to hide, so he went to court.

Hillary supporters want to sweep this under the rug.

The facts are likely to show that the Hillary supporters do not understand what happened at all.

No. The favoritism on the part of the DNC and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as well as the media toward Hillary is very evident in the way this has been handled.

There was most likely a breach of contract on the part of the contractor, the vendor that did not separate the data of the various campaigns at all times, did not properly maintain the firewall between the data of the Hillary and Sanders campaigns.

My suspicion is that Sanders' employees noticed that Hillary data was showing up in the general queries they did of the database supplied to them, and then, to verify that, indeed they were getting a mixture of Hillary and Sanders data, queried the database specifically for Hillary's information and found that, indeed, they were getting Hillary's information when they were not supposed to be getting it.

I say that based on my own experience querying databases some years ago, my own experience reviewing documents some years ago.

We shall see because an independent investigation will take place.

A big question for the Sanders campaign is, whether, since they were getting Hillary's data and the queries they did prove that fact, Hillary's campaign might have been getting Sanders' data and not been aware of that fact or just continued without further ado to use a combined database. I'm not saying that happened. I don't know.

But finding that out is one of the reasons that Bernie is probably going to push further for an independent investigation.

If Bernie was getting Hillary's data, it is quite possible that at least at times, Hillary was getting Bernie's data. Hillary's campaign may not have noticed or may have just quietly ignored the mixing of the data. It is also possible that the mixed data was only supplied to or dumped on the Bernie campaign.

This matter is not over. It is not time to move on.

The DNC made accusations. We want to know the full truth.

[PosterChild]

105. Fine. Keep banging your head against the wall. LOL/EOM

[Cha]

7. That's what they're trying to push but it's just not working.

[George II]

67. I was just about to say that, you beat me to it. If nothing wrong was done, why did Sanders....

.....apologize directly to Hillary Clinton last night on national television in front of millions of people?

[Tarc]

9. But wait! This is all a conspiracy between Clinton and Debbie Wasserman-Shultz!

The carping by some Sanders supporters is ringing mighty hollow at the moment.

[shenmue]

51. Yep

[DallasNE]

11. This Is What Bothers Some Of Us About Hillary

The DINO Hillary leaves us cold.

[Squinch]

84. What does that have to do with the OP?

[blackspade]

15. It wasn't a 'technology glitch'

It was a feature.

[murielm99]

16. Is it still all Clinton's fault?

Are we burning DWS at the stake yet?

[Cha]

21. They are.. I'm not. They were pissed there weren't enough debates but Hill has won everyone

of them.

They're pissed she held the bern campaign accountable for breaking the rules of their contract. It's always everyone's else fault.. never BS and his campaign.. even though they Sabotaged themselves.

[Cha]

17. It doesn't give the names of the "staffers".. wonder if it's any of these snoopers..

Patrick Dillon ?@mpdillon
Hard to see how this is just a campaign helpfully trying to alert a vendor of a problem. http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-12-18/sanders-campaign-fires-data-director-after-breach-of-clinton-files …

http://theobamadiary.com/2015/12/18/the-presidents-press-conference-4/

[JDPriestly]

27. If the vendor had properly secured the data and maintained the firewall, the queries could not

Have revealed any information.

The manager of Bernie's campaign stated in a video that the first failure of the firewall was n October and that he complained about it.

The vendor was hired to manage the database and presumably to secure them. Seems to me that is the problem.

Bernie's campaign as I understand it was given access to the files in question. They ran queries on a database to which they were carelessly given access.

The problem was the failure in security. If Bernie'ss campaign could. Access Hillary's information, then coulld Hillary's campaign have accessed the information from other campaigns?

[NanceGreggs]

33. "If the car owner ...

... hadn't left his keys in the ignition, I wouldn't have stolen his car - so it's really all his fault!"

"If Bernie's campaign could access Hillary's information, then could Hillary's campaign have accessed the information from other campaigns?"

IOW, "There's every possibility that while I was stealing this guy's car, he was stealing mine. So why don't we focus on THAT scenario?"

[LiberalFighter]

70. You got that right.

Just because the car keys are in the car doesn't mean it is okay to take it. Or just because the front door is open doesn't mean you can go in and eat the food.

As someone stated if the door is open you don't go in. You report it.

[PosterChild]

57. Excuses for obviously unethical behavior and....

.... extremely poor judgement are not helpful. Playing the victim will make things much worse.

Apologize and move on would be best.

[Agnosticsherbet]

31. Sanders staffers outright stole the data and used it to their advantage.

An alert would be made with a simple phone call to the company.

You would think technology mavens would know the difference between stealing data and using it and calling the company and reporting a problem.

Plausible deniability has required two more staffers to fall on their swords.

[Cha]

34. Yes, The sanders team Sabotaged their own campaign.. fell on their own petard and now BS has Fired

them for being stupid.

They were being sneaky and they got busted.

[Nye Bevan]

29. The "drip.... drip.... drip....." is killing him.

He should have immediately apologized and fired everyone involved. And called Hillary to apologize in person. The story would have been over in less than 24 hours.

[NanceGreggs]

30. Precisely.

And BS would have come off as the ethical hero who - immediately upon learning of the problem - dealt with it and moved on.

[Cha]

35. Agree.. BS handled this poorly.

[murielm99]

38. He has handled other things poorly.

The interruption by the BLM people is a great example.

He just is not Presidential.

[Cha]

39. Exactly.. it's in a long line of not having good instincts for what it takes to be POTUS.

[PosterChild]

58. +10 !! (NT)

[Blue_In_AK]

32. The Sanders campaign is correct to suspend these people.

There could be numerous reasons for why they did what they did, and maybe Uretsky's explanation is correct -- or maybe they just couldn't believe their luck, which sometimes happens in campaigns -- but the campaign was right to fire them.

[Tarheel_Dem]

36. "Where there's smoke". If I didn't trust BS before, this certainly hasn't improved my opinion.

Ron Paul ran into a similar problem with "a staffer", and wound up in court for his troubles.

[Bernin]

41. HRC and IT

Seems HRC and Servers and IT have some history.

I sure hope the Sanders campaign can get this lawsuit fast tracked like an oligarch free trade bill.

Kinda interesting that Hill and the gang have some history with servers and IT and such.

Yeah, there's definitely smoke here.

[MADem]

43. I think that lawsuit will result in those fired staffers being charged with computer fraud/hacking

That will come back to the campaign. Those defendants could well turn around and insist that they were acting on orders from Higher Authority. That's what people often do when they get 'berned.'

We'll see how long that lawsuit hangs around. The smoke you refer to is likely that lawsuit going up in smoke.

[PosterChild]

59. Any legal action taken by Bernie will be detremental....

.... to himand to the party. Playing the victim is the wrong move.

[MADem]

42. At least Senator SANDERS knows what the right thing to do is, here. And firing is the right thing

to do when you catch someone stealing.

If they'll steal from an opponent, that speaks to their integrity. One day, if things don't go their way, they could be stealing from you.

Good move, Senator Sanders. Well done.

[Bernin]

44. Prudent

I think the best option here is for the DNC to hash the drives on those servers and turn them over to the court for discovery.

I hope you feel the same way.

[MADem]

45. Clinton called for an independent audit the other day.

Her team was well out in front of this. So of course I feel the same way.


The theft of that modeling data was serious enough that three people, thus far, have been fired. This wasn't a "small thing" and it sure as hell wasn't someone probing the system for high-minded reasons. Those excuses are "no longer operative" to quote one of the most shameless spinmeisters of all time, Ron Zeigler.

Sanders realizes that some of his people acted without integrity and honor, and he has taken steps to correct that. This tells me that HE is a man of honor, even if some of his staffers are a bit sleazy. I do feel better about him, given that he fessed up, apologized, and did the right thing. I am quite confident that if anyone was giving staffers direction to steal that modeling data and run those keyword searches, it was NOT Sanders, himself.

I hope his supporters take a hint, and follow his lead.

[Bernin]

46. Coming up on 48 hours now.

A lot can happen to a hard drive in that time.
Has the DNC secured those drives?
Calling for an independent investigation and having an independent investigation are 2 different beasts.

I find it quite fishy that Hillary has used this IT group before and that somehow it's not a conflict of interest for them to house and maintain the DNC data...

[leftofcool]

47. First of all the DNC owns the drives so of course they have been secured.

Secondly, do a bit of homework. That company has been used by Al Gore, Bill Clinton and Obama. They work for Democrats and have been since 1992.

[Bernin]

48. So,

They are well connected to the Clinton machine.
That makes it not a conflict of interest how?

I thought the DNC was neutral in this?

And, you are confident that the drives were hashed as of the notice of this intrusion or the earlier one reported months ago?
Were they hashed as of both reported security breaches?
Who has custody of those saved records?

[MADem]

50. The independent investigation is going on now. It's probably why those two other guys on Sanders'

staff were shitcanned.

[Orangepeel]

60. Almost everybody uses NGP Van

http://plus.ngpvan.com/clients

I don't know if Sanders' senate campaigns used them or not, but I'd bet they did.


Clients Include:

The Democratic National Committee
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
The Democratic Governors Association
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee
Almost all the Democratic State Parties
International parties like the Liberal Party of Canada
Almost all the Democrats in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House
Thousands of other candidates for offices ranging from Governor to State Legislator to City Council
Many labor unions including the AFL-CIO and their affiliates
The Service Employees International Union
A number of other U.S. based and international unions
America Votes and hundreds of participating progressive public interest organizations
State Voices and hundreds of participating non-profit civic engagement groups
Leadership and progressive PACs, and non-partisan corporations and trade associations (A branded version of Campaign Office is available to Corporate and Trade Association PACs from CQ-Roll Call Group)
Many of the leading field, fundraising, new media, and other consulting companies

[PosterChild]

62. Holly shit! So all of those entities . ..

.... even FOREIGN entities, have been engaged in a massive, multi decade long CONSPIRACY to make sanders look bad?

No wonder his supporters are blaming clinton ! !

[KittyWampus]

80. He waited too long to get any credit for doing the right thing.

[MADem]

82. I thought his apology was heartfelt. It was a bit delayed, but I did think he meant it.

I think he is terribly embarrassed because his good name, his word as a person of integrity, his character have all been besmirched as a consequence of at least four or five, quite possibly more staffers, who jumped right in and started cheating.


I'll tell you, when all that shit was going on with Weaver and that other staffer sneering and screeching at press availabilities, I thought "Wow, what assholes--I can't believe they're doing this!"

I think when Sanders got the full brief on what's happening, he realized he'd been conned by his OWN STAFF. I'm betting it's uncomfortable to be close to the throne in that campaign right now. I don't think the BERN is feeling any of that Bern.

[okasha]

87. I have a hunch

that Information was initially withheld from the Senator and he had to ask some hard questions himself. His staff let him down in more ways than one.

I thought his apology was sincere and give him props for making it in public. (Of course, that benefitted him, too. It's still damned embarrassing to confess to an intimate gathering of several million people that your staff screwed the pooch. )

[turbinetree]

55. Really...........................

the responsibilities lie in the simple fact that the DNC hired this firm to maintain the firewalls, they did not, so there hands are not clean also.

The Sanders campaign went to the DNC to complain about this over three months ago, and nothing was done----------------------why.

The Sanders campaign was until recently being denied access to make phone calls or coordinate the campaign, when this breached happened.

As for some comparing this to Watergate, it is not,-------------------Watergate was a criminal enterprise set up by a sitting U.S President, Vice President and Attorney General and various other cronies in his re-election campaign, there actions where intentional to be a criminal enterprize, people really need to go back and re-read history on this fact, before labeling this issue as another Watergate, doesn't even come close.

The democratic party shot themselves in the foot in 1968 and 1972, because of the internal back fighting

And this issue is just like that, which occurred in 1968 and 1972, it was about the DNC back then as now, its about responsibilities


Honk----------------------for a political revolution because it is about getting a progressive U.S Supreme Court , Congress and State legislatures

Bernie 2016

[PosterChild]

61. Playing the victim and making excuses is ....

.... inappropriate and unhelpful. It's just digging the hole deeper and making it that much harder to climb out.

Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager:

"Clearly, while that information was made available to our campaign because of the incompetence of the vendor, it should not have been looked at. Period"

Sanders communications director Michael Briggs:

"After discussion with the DNC it became clear that one of our staffers accessed some modeling data from another campaign. That behavior is unacceptable, and that staffer was immediately fired."

http://www.npr.org/2015/12/18/460273748/bernie-sanders-campaign-locked-out-of-key-voter-file-after-data-breach

What the Sander's campaign did was unethical and stupid. Not much more to it than that.

[potone]

74. What would you have Sanders do?

It is not the first time that zealous campaign staffers succumbed to the temptation to take advantage of an opening despite the fact that they shouldn't have. What disturbs me about this is that some of Clinton's supporters are suggesting that Sanders himself did something unethical or encouraged his staffers to do that. I have seen zero evidence to support that claim, and he has apologized and dealt with the staff who behaved unethically. It is disingenuous to make this about his ethics.

[PosterChild]

81. I would expect him to do this:

I would expect him to do this:

In the debate, Sanders said: “Not only do I apologize to Secretary Clinton . . . I want to apologize to my supporters. This is not the type of campaign that we run.”

Clinton responded: “We were distressed when we learned of it . . . [but] we should move on because I don’t think the American people are all that interested in this. I think they’re more interested in what we have to say about all the big issues facing us.”

http://wapo.st/1Qye8wU

I think his suporters here on DU should have the common sense to do so too. And the Hillary suporters to follow Hillary's example.

[randome]

65. That goddamned Debbie! Why does she keep lording it over us?

Last edited Sun Dec 20, 2015, 02:23 PM - Edit history (1)

[hr][font color="blue"][center]"If you're bored then you're boring." -Harvey Danger[/center][/font][hr]

[patricia92243]

66. The breach in data was the best thing that has happened to Sanders lately. As an undecided

voter, I was HUGELY IMPRESSED with his apology. It shows a big man who doesn't want to waste time on a non-issue, but rather wants to discuss what is important to the public.

He could not have bought this much publicity in a year. It has been all over the news this morning, showing him being sincere and genuine. As one talking head said "It is a non-event." You could tell they had a panel ready to discuss it all up and down the line. It very obviously left them with nothing to talk about - almost to the point of being funny.

Again my hat is off to the man!

Now if his supporters could just show as much class - but that is another subject for another day.

[Gothmog]

68. There needs to a full and complete accounting here

[LiberalFighter]

71. There is.

They know who did what and when. Any time I go in and delete, add, or change anything it shows that I did it. Also the date. The time doesn't show but on the other side they likely have the information.

[The Second Stone]

75. This is a matter of character, and Sen. Sanders has good character

He is not responsible for creating the environment that led the staffers to this extremism, and his actions to repair it, discharge the staffers and apologize are correct and show that good character. Contrast Sen. Sanders good character with the bullying of Gov. Christi or the paranoid criminality of Pres. Nixon in similar situations and you may see what I am trying to illustrate.

He is fixing it and moving on, and so should we. Neither Sen. Sanders nor Sen. Clinton are going to dwell on this, they are both moving on.

I strongly support Sen. Clinton. However, if Sen. Sanders gets the nomination, which is possible, I will strongly support him. Or. Gov. O'Malley. Any of those three are far better than any in the Republican field as Sen. Sanders correctly pointed out in the New Hampshire debate.

[CTyankee]

79. I totally agree with your assessment.

This was a case of an overzealous staffer who probably thought of himself as a hero. He was seriously wrong. Bernie did the right things in response, as you pointed out. He tried no coverup and no hedging on apologies, unlike so many campaign staffers who have been guilty of both.

I am still totally supporting Bernie Sanders. He has given me no reason to withdraw that support. He has shown real dignity in a difficult situation.

I've got your back, Bernie!

[etherealtruth]

78. Sanders himself, has handled this well

it is irrelevant what some of his supporters have to say. HE handled this very well.

I also think Hillary did well with this .... DWS, is an incompetent tool, though

[Squinch]

85. I totally agree.

[Dawson Leery]

89. kick