Debbie Wasserman Schultz finally blew it bigtime, threw a monkey wrench in Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, and all she can do now is hope it can all blow over fast.
Fat chance.
Late Thursday night the mercurial Democratic National Committee chair cut off the Sanders campaign’s access to its comprehensive 50-state voter file that lists voter patterns and preferences. And he may never get it back.
The move effectively shuts down voter outreach operations of the Sanders campaign just over a month before the critical Iowa caucus and a little over 50 days before the New Hampshire primary.
Wasserman Schultz, a Hillary Clinton supporter, has worked the last eight months to keep the Democratic debates on the graveyard shift of the political calendar. But squashing Sanders wasn't working. In fact, she ran headlong into the biggest week of the Sanders campaign.
The Vermont senator had just announced his campaign's latest milestone of 2 million campaign contributions, with more than $2 million raised in just 72 hours. He also received major endorsements from the 700,000-member Communications Workers of America union and reeled in 88.9 percent of 270,000 votes cast in Democracy for America’s official endorsement poll.
DWS had to do something.
The outreach-program shutdown was DWS' punishment as the result of a 30-minute glitch, a security bug, in the DNC's voter file, which made Clinton's files accessible to Sanders' campaign.
Michael Briggs, a communications aide for the Sanders campaign, said this isn’t the first time they’ve reported security bugs in the DNC’s voter file.
“On more than one occasion, the vendor has dropped the firewall between the data of different Democratic campaigns. Our campaign months ago alerted the DNC to the fact that campaign data was being made available to other campaigns,” Briggs has told reporters. “At that time our campaign did not run to the media, relying instead on assurances from the vendor.”
But the DNC has vowed to not grant the Sanders campaign access to the voter file until it proves it destroyed all of the Clinton campaign data an aide inadvertently accessed.
Which is impossible. How does the Sanders campaign prove it destroyed something it doesn’t have? The ban on accessing critical voter information could be indefinite.
Briggs explains the sequence of events: “The DNC hires a group to manage their database and firewall between the campaigns. They screw up and some low-level Sanders staffer sees and reports it. Nothing is saved or printed out and now the DNC is withholding crucial access to voter data until the Sanders campaign can prove it doesn’t have the data from the Clinton campaign ..."
Sanders has already filed a lawsuit against the DNC.
Sanders’ campaign said it had fired a staff member who accessed the Clinton campaign’s data. A DNC official told NBC News that it is believed a total of four people breached Clinton’s data.
DWS told CNN Friday, "It's the same as somebody going into your house because you left the door unlocked and helping themselves to your property. It's wrong. It's stealing."
Even the Clinton campaign has characterized the Sanders people as thieves, according to CNN.
This is a nasty one, folks.
The next Democratic debate is set for 8 p.m. Eastern time Saturday, happening opposite a primetime NFL football game. Viewership was expected to rival a Lawrence Welk rerun. Not likely now. A curious national TV audience is building as we speak, anticipating how fiery Sanders will react.
In the meantime, it's difficult to imagine that on reflection Hillary Clinton -- if she's been looking to make Sanders invisible -- will be happy with this turn events. Only Sanders can win here. Network news stations claim events have already energized his base.
The Vermont socialist probably already has a strategy for dealing with this. But he might consider telling the DNC this had nothing to do with him, and that the data wasn’t marked confidential and potentially damaging when his staff accessed it and passed it around. No matter how ridiculous and non-responsive that answer might be, Sanders can remind the DNC that they’ll be making the same argument about Hillary’s e-mail scandal after she wins the Democratic nomination while campaigning to put her in charge of national security.
Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at 228-282-2423. Twitter: @NancyLBSmith
