Bernie Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver assailed the Democratic National Committee at a press conference Friday, accusing it of holding the campaign "hostage" by cutting of its access to the party's voter database and threatening to file a lawsuit if it was not restored.
"This is taking our campaign hostage," Weaver said. "We have a grassroots campaign, so when we have people come to our campaign headquarters to call volunteers or to call voters to talk about Bernie Sanders' campaign to transform America, we can't generate phone numbers to do that ... We are, because of the nature of our campaign, peculiarly affected by this type of taking of data hostage [sic] by the DNC."
The DNC enacted the punishment after learning that employees of the Sanders campaign improperly hacked Hillary Clinton's campaign's private voter data. The staffer responsible was dismissed by the Sanders team.
The Los Angeles Times reported:
The Democratic Party has cut off Bernie Sanders' access to its massive voter database – a crucial tool presidential candidates rely on to target their operations – after it learned that Sanders campaign employees tapped into the private files of rival Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
The act of online campaign espionage, and the potential it has to hurt insurgent Sanders at a do-or-die moment in the campaign, underscores the ever-growing role data play in modern presidential campaigns, where resources are marshaled around precise formulas that factor in such details as where voters live, their latest purchases at big-box retailers and even what magazines they read.
The Sanders campaign says it fired the employee who made the decision to snoop on the Clinton files. "After discussion with the DNC, it became clear that one of our staffers accessed some modeling data from another campaign," said a statement from campaign spokesman Michael Briggs. "That behavior is unacceptable and that staffer was immediately fired."
Weaver accused the DNC of showing bias in favor of Clinton, and he said the campaign had invested tremendous resources in acquiring the data to which the DNC, in an "inappropriate overreaction," had denied them proper access.
"Rather incredibly, the leadership of the DNC has used this incident to shut down our ability to access our own information," Weaver said. "Information which is the lifeblood of this campaign. This is the information about our supporters, our volunteers, the list of people we intend to contact in Iowa, New Hampshire and elsewhere."
By their action, Weaver said the DNC's leadership "is now actively attempting to undermine our campaign."
"This is unacceptable," he said. "Individual leaders of the DNC can support Hillary Clinton in any way they want, but they are not going to sabotage our campaign, one of the strongest grassroots campaigns in modern history."
Weaver said the campaign would go to federal court by the end of the day if the DNC continued to deny them access to the voter database.
DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D., Fla.) has staved off criticism from both Sanders and the Martin O'Malley campaign that she is rigging the Democratic primary for Clinton, particularly with her decision to hold only six sanctioned debates.