You don’t have to be a Bernie Sanders fan to appreciate the rich irony of the Hillary Clinton campaign accusing anyone of breaking the law.
The Hill reports:
Clinton campaign says Sanders staff may have broken law
Hillary Clinton’s campaign alleged on Friday evening that Bernie Sanders staffers engaged in what was “potentially a crime,” and demanded the Sanders campaign prove they don’t still have access to the breached voter files.
“This is totally unacceptable and may have been a violation of the law,” said Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook.
“There may be damage here that can’t be undone and I hope the Sanders campaign will acknowledge what they did, but we need assurances as soon as possible that they can’t continue to do more damage,” he continued.
Mook excoriated the Sanders campaign for fundraising off the issue and for politicizing it by claiming it was evidence the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was in the tank for Clinton.
The Vermont senator’s campaign sent out a fundraising email Friday afternoon that called on supporters to sign a petition calling on the DNC to return the data back to Sanders.
“This is incredibly disappointing,” said Mook. “Someone who said they’d run a different kind of campaign, and their staff stole data from us and is seeking to fundraise off this. It’s very serious and not something to be fundraising off of.”
The Clinton campaign dismissed the notion, put forth by the Sanders campaign, that a lone staffer had happened upon the data, insisting that on 25 occasions at least four Sanders staffers made inquiries into their data tables and sought to save or export the data to maintain possession of it once the system was repaired.
And the Clinton campaign sought to highlight the importance of the data that had been breached.
“The data they reached in and took from our campaign is effectively the strategic roadmap for us,” Mook said. “They could ascertain how many people we expect tor un and a number of other fundamental parts of our strategy.”
It’ll be interesting to see if any of this is addressed in the debate tonight.
