The Iowa caucuses are fast approaching. The second Democratic debate has just taken place.
Bernie Sanders, who had been leading in Iowa polling done earlier this year, is now well behind Hillary Clinton in most polls of registered Iowa Democrats and likely Democratic caucusgoers.
So, when two high-level Sanders campaign officials (not the single “low-level staffer” the campaign first mentioned) were caught doing what no other campaign had done to the NGP-VAN-maintained Democratic National Committee voter database in the nineteen years of NGP VAN’s existence — namely, rushing to take advantage of a temporary site vulnerability to access a rival campaign’s data and create at least 24 lists from it — it was essential that the Sanders campaign immediately commit to doing the right things.
They did one of the right things on Thursday by firing the lead culprits, National Data Director Josh Uretsky (who apparently was only hired by the campaign in September) and his deputy Russell Drapkin. But they didn’t publicly apologize to either the DNC or the Clinton campaign, nor (a far worse error) did they promise to destroy any data they took using their list-building tools.
Finally, a long-suffering Debbie Wasserman Schultz, after putting up with months of abuse from the Sanders campaign and the people they’d whipped up into a frenzy of hatred, lowered the boom: No more NGP VAN access for the Sanders campaign until you can clearly explain what happened (no more shifting stories) and show that you’ve destroyed the data you stole. Observers (such as AmericaBlog’s Jon Green) who at first thought it a harsh response soon came to support Schultz’ action as reasonable given the Sanders’ campaign’s ever-evolving stories and the need to ensure the integrity and security of the database.
The response of top Sanders campaign brass Jeff Weaver and Tad Devine: Lie to their supporters, both outright and by omission, about what had happened — and then try to fundraise off of the lies.
There was of course the ridiculous attention-grabbing lawsuit threat which most folks knew wasn’t going anywhere. It served to conceal the Sanders’ campaign’s tardy but eventual acquiescence to Schultz’ eminently reasonable demands, and was more about salving their own egoes than anything else. (I hope the soothing was satisfactory, because the optics thereof were horrible to the world outside of the Sanders campaign.) But the worst thing, in my view, were the lies the campaign told, both to the world and to their own supporters, complete with an escalation of the inflammatory and demonizing “Three Minutes Hate” language used against not only Hillary Clinton, but against Schultz and the DNC itself. This does nothing to help Bernie and everything to hurt all Democrats.
Pat Rynard’s Iowa Starting Line has a good rundown. Here’s part of it (emphases mine):
Their national data director (not, as they tried to play it off earlier, a “low-level” staffer) took advantage of a breach in the VAN’s firewall to access sensitive and valuable proprietary data from the Clinton campaign. While the Sanders campaign called this act “unacceptable” and quickly fired the staffer, they also consistently framed it in a larger complaint against the DNC and the VAN.
Then, in what is perhaps the most irresponsible fundraising email I’ve ever seen, the Sanders campaign actually tried to raise money off it. And that’s where this went from an embarrassing press day for Democrats to a seriously dangerous moment for the Democratic Party’s chances in 2016.
In an email entitled “Urgent: DNC tipping the scales for Hillary Clinton,” the Sanders campaign accused the DNC of trying to “undermine” their campaign by shutting down their database access. They framed the situation as being caused by “a fault in [the DNC’s] own technology platforms.” At absolutely no point in the email did they mention in any way that one of their top staffers improperly accessed Clinton data and was fired for it.
In fact, they tried to pass themselves off as the heroes of this situation in their press conference and press release. The Sanders campaign discovered a glitch in the VAN’s software back in October, they say, and brought it to the attention of the DNC then. They were being punished when they were the ones who found the problem, a line their die-hard supporters repeated non-stop throughout the day.
Just one problem: NGP VAN says they were never alerted to such a problem, and in interviews on Friday afternoon, the former Sanders data director, Josh Uretsky, says the glitch being referred to wasn’t even with the VAN. It was a different program. So not only did the Sanders campaign commit a lie of omission in their fundraising email, it appears they outright lied about the earlier problem to the press. Or, at the very least, this was yet another instance where many people inside the Sanders campaign don’t seem to be on the same page. [Update: However, Wasserman Schultz seemed to indicate in an interview in CNN last night that they did know about the October issue, and seems to imply it was with the VAN. I’ll check to see if this is really the case, or if she didn’t understand which database she was talking about. Update 2: I’ve confirmed the October issue was not the VAN]
And even if that was the case, that still in no way excuses their staff accessing the Clinton data. If anything, it makes it worse. If they knew that VAN occasionally drops the firewall, they should have had procedures in place to immediately contact VAN to make sure the Clinton campaign couldn’t see their data.
As for the excuse given that Uretsky’s and Drapkin’s actions were about being White Hats and checking out the state of the breach, nobody with experience in either IT or election databases is buying that. Rynard himself has worked with the VAN database since 2003, and he says “But you don’t even need that much experience to realize that the searches Uretsky and his deputy were conducting were designed to ascertain specific modeling and targeting data from the Clinton campaign. Running multiple searches for 40 minutes of Clinton turnout and persuasion scores in key early states is an obvious attempt to glean valuable data from your rival.” (See also the page of the VAN log that appears at the top of this diary.) Even if you couldn’t download any data, you could use the time-tested technique of reading what appears on the screen and then either writing it onto paper or writing or typing it into a computer tablet. (Hackers love this method as it leaves less of an electronic trail.)
Before yesterday, I was thinking that Bernie’s campaign, though it wouldn’t win him the White House, would at the very least boost his profile on Capitol Hill. I thought that he might finally join Elizabeth Warren (who has been on the Hill for far less time than him) as a power player in the Senate. But that's not going to happen now. Even if Bernie didn’t write those emails, threaten that lawsuit, or exploit that temporary database vulnerability, he hired the people who did, and it’s going to call his judgment into question forevermore.