"Datagate" and A Big Week for Bernie Sanders

On Wednesday, late in the afternoon, Bernie met with officers of the Communication Workers of America to receive their endorsement. The 700,000 members voted for him to be the POTUS. An activist-led union, their members will work to help Bernie secure the nomination. Their former president, Larry Cohen resigned his job at CWA in order to work fulltime for Bernie.

On Thursday morning, Democracy for America, an organization that grew out of Howard Dean's '04 run for president, reported that 87% of their vote gave the nod to Bernie. 250,000 of its 1 million members participated in the vote.

This time the record is the 2.3 million contributions to the Sanders campaign, surpassing the record of 2.1 million that Obama set when he ran in '08.

On Wednesday, the Sanders' staffers noticed a breach in the firewall that separates the Sanders' data from Clinton's. At the same time Sanders' data became available to Clinton's staff. This data that the campaigns are using has been collected over the years by the DNC who charges candidates for this service. It includes names of people who have voted in elections, where they voted, information about voters in a particular state, etc. Candidates then add their own information such as contact information for voters who are strong supporters and, in Iowa, the caucuses they will attend, volunteers, staff in any given state. It is particularly valuable to candidates like O'Malley and Sanders who had no base of information like this for their campaigns. Hillary has lists from '08, for instance.

According to the Sanders' campaign, this was the second breach of this nature. The first one happened in October and it was reported to the DNC. No one went to the press.

NGP-Van (NV), the contractor hired by Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (DWS) to supervise this service supposedly fixed it. The problem is that DWS was co-chair of HRC's '08 campaign. Both co-founders of the contractor she hired as well as their outreach person worked for the Clintons in their campaign organizations and/or in the White House. Plus, NV's vice-president is a nephew of DWS.

DWS is not an impartial DNC chair. Added to this are the limited number of debates and the debate schedule that many political veterans as well as O'Malley and Sanders claim were put together to limit exposure of HRC's challengers. What would be the rationale for scheduling two debates on Saturday evenings? (6.1 million people viewed this debate compared to 17 million who watched the Republicans on Tuesday.)The next one will take place on the Sunday Night of the three-day weekend marking Martin Luther King's birthday. DNC members complain that these decisions were made without their knowledge or approval.

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