Chairwoman Schultz intentionally misrepresents the facts after the Sanders campaign VAN administrator stumbled upon and investigated a VAN software bug introduced Wednesday morning, December 16th, at approximately 10:40 AM, when NGP VAN, the company whose software hosts the Democratic National Committee’s voter file, installed a routine software update. The update introduced a bug that allowed members of Hillary Clinton’s and Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, among others, to filter the voter records they share using custom “scores” each campaign had independently tagged to those common voter records. Such custom scores tagged by individual campaigns are to be private to those campaigns, but the bug exposed that campaign specific scoring as public data to all VAN users. (about which more shortly).
Josh Uretsky was the Sanders campaign’s National Data Director who discovered NGP VAN had opened every candidate's campaign data for viewing by every other NGP VAN client user.
WaPo headlined its story, "DNC penalizes Sanders campaign for improper access of Clinton voter data," with a lead paragraph reporting,
"Officials with the Democratic National Committee have accused the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders of improperly accessing confidential voter information gathered by the rival campaign of Hillary Clinton, according to several party officials." The article's third paragraph said, "The discovery sparked alarm at the DNC, which promptly shut off the Sanders campaign’s access to the strategically crucial list of likely Democratic voters." The DNC had shut down access Wednesday morning.That WaPo news headline replaced the day's headline story that Sen. Sanders received endorsements from the 700,000-member Communications Workers of America union, secured 88.9 percent of 270,000 votes cast in Democracy for America’s official endorsement poll, and received a record 2 million campaign contributions, with over $2 million raised in just 72 hours.
The initial Thursday night Washington Post story and all subsequent stories through the day Friday were clearly originally sourced from individuals at the DNC and NGP VAN. The frame of that sourced reporting - "Sanders campaign gained improper access to" and "breached" Clinton data - gives the impression Sanders campaign staffers with malice of forethought hacked system security to access Clinton campaign data. The DNC seemingly used that same framing language in notifying the Clinton campaign its data had been breach through four Sanders campaign VAN/VoteBuilder userids.
DNC Chair Wasserman Schultz, by taking the story public, stating to Washington Post reporters and other reporters she cut off Sanders campaign access to the DNC's voter information database, because Sanders' campaign staff had "improperly accessed confidential voter information of Hillary Clinton's campaign" and that "cutting the Sanders' campaign's access is the only way we can make sure we can protect our significant asset that is the voter file," Schultz instantly flipped Sanders' news momentum for the week, leading into the Saturday Democratic debate, from positive to negative.
