Sanders Staff Improperly Accessed Clinton Voter Data at Length

At least four individuals affiliated with the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign conducted searches of and saved the Hillary Clinton campaign's confidential lists of potential voters over a period of more than 40 minutes, documents show.

The database breach is related to a software error at the technology company NGP VAN, which provides campaigns with voter data. As a result of the glitch, "all users on the system across the Democratic campaigns were inadvertently able to access some data belonging to other campaigns for a brief window," Democratic National Committee spokesman Luis Miranda said.

DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz said the allegation is that the Sanders staffer or staffers accessed the Clinton campaign's voter-file information, exported it and downloaded it.

Sanders campaign National data Director Josh Uretsky and Deputy National Data Director Russell Drapkin allegedly are two of the staffers who improperly opened the data. 

A series of documents outlining an audit trail maintained by the database company indicates that the four individuals spent a total of about 40 minutes conducting searches of the Clinton data. Those searches included terms that point to Sanders' team gaining access to lists from more than 10 early voting states of Clinton's likely supporters. That data was saved to personal folders.

It also appears that Drapkin "suppressed" two folders after the database company became aware of the breach.

NGP VAN said the incident occurred Dec. 16, while a patch was being applied to the software, according to the Washington Post. “The process briefly opened a window into proprietary information from other campaigns,” the Post reported.

The company described the event as an isolated incident that was fairly short in duration: “By lunchtime, it was resolved.”

Uretsky said that he takes responsibility for the incident but that he did not believe accessing the data was wrong.

"We didn't use [the data] for anything valuable and we didn't take custodianship of it," Uretsky said, arguing that he was trying to document the existence of the security breach but not exploit it.

"It's like if somebody leaves the front door open and you left a note inside the front door saying 'you left the door open,'' and then maybe you would check the side door to make sure that door was closed," he said.

In a statement, Sanders' campaign faulted NGP VAN, the data systems vendor, for continuing to "make serious errors."

"On more than one occasion, the vendor has dropped the firewall between the data of different Democratic campaigns," the campaign said. "Our campaign months ago alerted the DNC to the fact that campaign data was being made available to other campaigns. At that time our campaign did not run to the media, relying instead on assurances from the vendor.

"Unfortunately, yesterday, the vendor once again dropped the firewall between the campaigns for some data."