Sanders' Staffer Fired for Wrongfully Accessing Clinton Campaign Data

A member of the Sanders campaign has been fired after wrongfully accessing modeling data from the Clinton campaign.

According to the story first reported by the Washington Post, the DNC suspended the Sanders campaign's access to its party voter data after discovering the breach, a move that could seriously impact the Vermont senator’s field organizing and campaigning efforts just weeks before the first primary votes are cast.

Michael Briggs, spokesperson for the Sanders campaign, blamed the incident on the software vendor used by the Democratic National Committee.

“Sadly, the vendor who runs the DNC’s voter file program continues to make serious errors. 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 wrote in a statement to ABC News.

“Unfortunately, yesterday, the vendor once again dropped the firewall between the campaigns for some data,” the statement continued. At this point, conversations between the DNC and the campaign reportedly revealed that one of Sanders’s staffers had accessed Clinton campaign data, a move which the Sanders team called “unacceptable,” and the staffer was let go.

“We are as interested as anyone in making sure that the software flaws are corrected since mistakes by the DNC’s vendor also have made our records vulnerable. We are working with the DNC and the vendor and hope that this kind of lapse will not occur again,” the statement from Briggs continued.

Briggs acknowledged that having access to the DNC’s data was important and said that the campaign was working to resolve the issue. He added that he was “confident” the situation would be worked out.

The news comes at the end of what had been seen as a surprisingly good day for Sanders. He received two high-profile endorsements, one from the national Communications Workers of America union and another from the progressive activist organization Democracy for America. The campaign also trumpeted a milestone fundraising mark Thursday morning -- 2 million contributions, from over 800,000 donors, according to the campaign.

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