Extra Lazy Saturday Reads: Bernie v. DNC and Tonight’s Democratic Debate

Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton at the Oct. 13 CNN debate

Good Afternoon!

I really didn’t want to look at the headlines this morning after the embarrassing dust-up between the Bernie Sanders campaign and the DNC. Reading and listening to the media coverage last night was depressing as hell for me as a supporter of Hillary Clinton for President and more generally, the effort to elect women to high political offices.

The media generally treated the Sanders campaign as the victim, even though one of their high level staffers and at least three other campaign workers took advantage of a software glitch to run 25 searches, download proprietary data and save it to their personal files. Here is what they did, according to Bloomberg Politics:

According to an audit obtained by Bloomberg, Sanders staffers exploited a temporary glitch in the DNC’s voter database on Wednesday to save lists created by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon told reporter there were “24 intrusion attempts” by the Sanders campaign. He and Mook insisted that the Clinton campaign did not take advantage of the bug to look at Sanders’ data.

The database logs created by NGP VAN show that four accounts associated with the Sanders team took advantage of the Wednesday morning breach. 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. Campaigns rent access to a master file of DNC voter information from the party, and update the files with their own data culled from field work and other investments.

After one Sanders account gained access to the Clinton data, the audits show, that user began sharing permissions with other Sanders users. The staffers who secured access to the Clinton data included Uretsky and his deputy, Russell Drapkin. The two other usernames that viewed Clinton information were “talani” and “csmith_bernie,” created by Uretsky’s account after the breach began.

The logs show that the Vermont senator’s team created at least 24 lists during the 40-minute breach, which started at 10:40 a.m., and saved those lists to their personal folders. The Sanders searches included New Hampshire lists related to likely voters, “HFA Turnout 60-100” and “HFA Support 50-100,” that were conducted and saved by Uretsky. Drapkin’s account searched for and saved lists including less likely Clinton voters, “HFA Support <30” in Iowa, and “HFA Turnout 30-70″‘ in New Hampshire.

After the news broke, Sanders’ campaign manager Jeff Weaver blamed the DNC for essentially tempting their workers and did not apologize for or even admit stealing voter information from Clinton.

Josh Uretsky

The Sanders campaign fired its “data director” Josh Uretsky, and then Uretzky proceeded to claim in interviews that they took Clinton data in order to “prove” there was a “breach” in the software. From TPM:

The former data director for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)’s presidential campaign said Friday that staffers for the campaign accessed and saved voter information from opponent Hillary Clinton in order to prove to the Democratic National Committee that their voter information system had been breached.

In a phone interview, Josh Uretsky told MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki that the Sanders staffers “wanted to document and understand the scope of the problem so that we could report it accurately.” Uretsky was fired Friday after news of the breach broke.

He said that he and other staffers accused of accessing the confidential information “knew that what we were doing was trackable” and they did not “use it for anything valuable.”

Come on. Why didn’t Uretsky just call the DNC or the IT provider and let them handle it? Alternatively, they could have informed the Clinton campaign directly. The fact is they stole information they weren’t entitled to and then became outraged when they were caught.

Jeff Weaver

Next, the Sanders campaign actually filed suit against the DNC in Federal court. The dispute was supposedly settled after midnight last night, but there obviously is still bad blood, and BTW the Sanders campaign had to agree to cooperate with an independent audit.

We have to assume that if Sanders is willing to allow his staff to steal data and not even come forward with an apology, we probably can’t trust his promise not to run a third party campaign and stick us with one of the insane GOP candidates as POTUS.

And tonight Sanders and Clinton will meet in the latest Democratic debate.

The Sanders campaign has whined repeatedly about the number of debates, claiming the DNC is putting its finger on the scale for Clinton by having only six debates and schedule some of them on weekends. I really don’t understand why they would do that, since Clinton performs very well in debates. As one of her supporters, I wish there were more of them to showcase her knowledge and experience.

Will Bernie go negative tonight, despite his many promises to run a positive campaign? How will Hillary handle the situation? I hope she’ll be magnanimous, as suggested by the Associated Press:

In the first debate of the Democratic presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders dismissed concerns about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account and server while she was secretary of state. Americans, he said, were tired of talking about her “damn emails.”

Will Clinton return the favor in Saturday night’s debate in New Hampshire?

The disclosure on Friday that four members of Sanders’ team improperly accessed voter information compiled by Clinton’s campaign shook up what had been a relatively civil race. The development has the potential to transform the debate – the third of the race and the last of the year – into something far livelier.

For Clinton, the question was how forcefully to confront the Vermont senator about the matter and whether to defend the reaction of the Democratic National Committee, which cut off Sanders’ access to the party’s voter database after learning of the breach. Sanders’ campaign said its access was restored Saturday morning….

During the debate, Clinton could choose to play down the issue in the way that Sanders did with his dismissal of questions about Clinton’s email use.

If Clinton did that, she probably would avoid alienating Sanders supporters – the passionate liberal voters she will need to win the general election should she capture the Democratic nomination.

I’m not sure I agree with that last paragraph. Bernie’s most passionate supporters are unlikely to come around to supporting Clinton in the general election. They are a pretty immature group. But these dudebro “progressives” and the media would love to have Hillary attack poor Bernie so they can really pound her. After all, they’ve already been doing it for months.

I saw numerous “liberals” attacking Hillary in very ugly terms on Twitter last night, and many of them said they would never vote for her under any circumstances. These are the same people who freaked out when some Hillary supporters refused to vote for Obama in 2008.

The AP article also notes that the Sanders campaign rushed to take advantage of the “dustup” by raising money on their unethical conduct and the resulting punishment.

Even before the suit, Sanders’ campaign was trying for a political edge, sending a fundraising email to supporters that said the DNC had placed “its thumb on the scales in support of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”

The email made no mention of the campaign’s decision to fire a worker involved in the data breach or the admission from campaign manager Jeff Weaver that the worker’s actions were “unacceptable.”

That’s simply shameful in my opinion. This story is still developing, so I’ll post more links in the comment thread, and I hope you’ll do the same.

We’re less than a week from Christmas and it’s been slow as usual at this time of year. Unless we get really busy, let’s use this post as a live blog for tonight’s debate. If we get a lot of comments this afternoon, I’ll put up another post tonight. I’ll definitely be watching the entire debate.

The debate will be on ABC, and the network is providing a live stream for people who want to watch on line.

What are your thoughts on all this? What other stories are you following? Please share in the comment thread, if you have a minute free today.