Bernie Sanders's campaign met a road block earlier last week before the Democratic Debate on Saturday night. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) suspended his campaign's access to his voters' database after one of his staffers discovered a breach in the data, allowing him to access Hillary Clinton's voters' database. The campaign aide was fired in succession, as Sanders was accused of taking advantage of Clinton's data.
The fired aide, Josh Uretsky, claimed that he was trying to understand the breach, as he found that the Sanders campaign's data was harmfully exposed just as much as Clinton's. He said he was not at all trying to take advantage of Clinton's data. Nevertheless, Sanders called Uretsky's actions "unacceptable" and fired him.
"Two senior Democrats familiar with the program and the investigation told CNN that the Sanders campaign accessed turnout projections for Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, a key piece of strategy the Clinton campaign has been working on with modeling and analytics."
Furthermore, DNC chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz said that the Sanders campaign not only viewed the material, but downloaded it. She furthered with a metaphor: "That is just like if you walked into someone's home when the door was unlocked and took things that don't belong to you in order to use them for your own benefit." However, she acknowledged that Sanders himself took no part in the breach of information, and was ignorant to the situation until the next day.“He was stunned,” she said. “I know that Sen. Sanders had absolutely nothing to do with this...Unfortunately, he has staff who acted inappropriately, and they need to be held accountable.”
On Friday, the Sanders campaign sued the DNC in a federal court for favoring Clinton in the race, causing the campaign to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars a day by suspending their voter database access, and suspending the privilege wrongfully by not providing an explanation for the suspension nor allowing 10 days to address the issue.
By Saturday, access to the database was regranted with the DNC continuing to investigated the campaign to make sure that Clinton's data was deleted. The Sanders campaign promised full cooperation with the DNC.
Does this bump in Sanders's campaign road expose Sanders as a politician as corrupt as the rest of them, or does it exhibit him as one who would address unfairness, take quick, heavy-handed action and cooperate diplomatically once the issue is to be resolved as a president? The episode should show interesting results in his poll numbers and the Democratic debate on Saturday.