Bernie Sanders Bags Key Endorsements, Gets Sandbagged by the DNC

Bernie Sanders' Presidential campaign posted some big wins this week with endorsements by a major national union and a liberal activist group. But tensions with the Democratic National Committee exploded into a crisis, as the DNC hobbled the campaign by blocking access to voter and donor data, and the Sanders campaign hit back with a federal lawsuit.

CJ Ciaramella, Tamerra Griffin, John Nichols, Sarah Lazaze BuzzFeed, The Nation, Common Dreams
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Bernie Sanders Campaign Sues DNC Over Voter Data

By CJ Ciaramella and Tamerra Griffin, BuzzFeed News Reporters
December 18, 2015
BuzzFeed News

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’s campaign on Friday filed a federal lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee after aides were barred from accessing voter data collected and compiled by the campaign.

The complaint demands that the DNC restore its access to the data and calls for at least $75,000 in damages. It states that a request for a temporary restraining order will be forthcoming “immediately.”

Asked Friday evening when the filling was expected, Sanders spokesperson Michael Briggs told BuzzFeed News, “Lawyers are working into the night.”

The suit comes after the DNC penalized the Sanders campaign for gaining access to Hillary Clinton’s private voter data information, BuzzFeed News reported Thursday.

At a press conference Friday, Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver railed against the DNC for its “inappropriate reaction,” and accused the committee of denying the campaign access to its own voter information.

“We are announcing today that if the DNC continues to hold our campaign hostage, we will be in federal court this afternoon seeking immediate relief,” he said.

The lawsuit has been assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan, nominated to the federal district court in D.C. by President Obama at the end of 2013. After approval from the Senate, she took the bench in June 2014.

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The complaint offers a glimpse into the Sanders campaign, stating for example that over three days in December it managed to raise more than $2.4 million. “Most of this money came from individual donors identified through, inter alia, the strategic use of Voter Data,” it stated.

The Sanders campaign estimated the costs of being cut off from the data “exceed $600,000 per day.”

A similar security breach happened during the 2008 presidential primaries, the complaint said, and ended up transmitting confidential information to another still-prominent candidate: Clinton.

The information breach came through the NGP VAN, which allowed a short window of time for access to crucial voter ID statistics.

The campaign aide who briefly accessed Clinton’s files was immediately fired after the incident.

The complaint offers new details about how the security breach worked through the Sanders campaign. Indeed, it states that “several” staff members viewed and accessed confidential information, though “most” of them did so inadvertently. The breach then prompted an internal investigation which revealed “that one individual may have repeatedly accessed” the information. That person was then fired.

Ultimately, the complaint alleges, the “inadvertent access” of confidential information didn’t actually violate the Sanders campaign’s contract with the DNC, and the DNC didn’t give the campaign a contractually-required notice that it was cutting them off.

“The Campaign should not be punished for the carelessness of the DNC and its third-party vendor,” the complaint adds.

Jeff Weaver, campaign manager for Bernie Sanders, talks to the media Friday in Washington. Yuri Gripas / Reuters

Weaver said the Sanders campaign would seek a complete audit of the DNC’s operations from the beginning of campaigning through the present. Such a probe would include a similar data breach in August which resulted in exposed data from the Sanders campaign.

Weaver said that the issue was brought to the DNC and they were assured it would not happen again.

He called the DNC’s response to Wednesday’s breach “inappropriate,” and charged the DNC with trying to sabotage their campaign.

“I would like to see another instance where a presidential campaign was locked out of its own volunteer data,” Weaver said.

In a statement Friday, Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said a decision on the Sanders campaign’s access to data will be made after the DNC gets a “full accounting” of what happened.

“Once the DNC became aware that the Sanders campaign had inappropriately and systematically accessed Clinton campaign data, and in doing so violated the agreement that all the presidential campaigns have signed with the DNC, as the agreement provides, we directed NGP VAN to suspend the Sanders campaign’s access to the system until the DNC is provided with a full accounting of whether or not this information was used and the way in which it was disposed,” she said. “I have personally reached out to Senator Sanders to make sure that he is aware of the situation. When we receive this report from the Sanders campaign, we will make a determination of re-enabling the campaign’s access to the system.”

Hillary for America spokesperson Brian Fallon said in a statement Friday that the organization was “informed that our proprietary data was breached by Sanders campaign staff in 25 searches by four different accounts and that this data was saved into the Sanders’ campaign account.”

“We are asking that the Sanders campaign and the DNC work expeditiously to ensure that our data is not in the Sanders campaign’s account and that the Sanders campaign only have access to their own data,” Fallon continued.

The progressive grassroots organization Democracy For America, which endorsed Sanders yesterday, called the DNC’s actions “profoundly damaging to the party’s democratic process” in a statement handed out to reporters at the press conference.

Bernie Sanders Just Got Two of His Biggest Endorsements Yet

A major progressive activist group and a major union issue endorsements of the insurgent Democratic contender.
By John Nichols

December 17, 2015

Candidates seek election-season endorsements for a lot of reasons. Endorsements by groups with substantial membership bases, and with a capacity to turn out those members for favored candidates, have the obvious potential to shape election results. But there’s more to it than that. Endorsements can legitimize political upstarts. Endorsements can solidify the positions of front-runners. And endorsements can give a boost to a candidate at a critical stage in the process.
Backers of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who is fighting to catch up with former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in the critical first-caucus state of Iowa, and who is fighting to maintain a narrow lead in the critical first-primary state of New Hampshire, say he got just such a boost Thursday when a pair of major endorsements were announced.
Within minutes of one another, the progressive activist group Democracy for America and the Communications Workers of America union both backed the senator in the race for the Democratic nomination.
DFA, which was started by backers of former Vermont Governor Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential bid, has grown into a well-regarded grassroots political and issue-advocacy organization with active groups in states across the country and a track record of backing progressive candidates at the local, state and federal levels. Early in the 2016 race, the group urged Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren to seek the Democratic nomination. This month, it conducted a national poll of members that concluded December 15. Sanders won 87.9 percent of the 271,527 votes cast in a contest where an endorsement could only be secured with a super-majority (66.67 percent or more) of all the votes cast. Clinton (who is backed by Howard Dean) took 10.3 percent, while 1.1. percent backed Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley.
The level of support for Sanders was unprecedented. When the 11-year-old group held a similar vote on whether to endorse in the 2008 presidential race, no candidate cleared the super-majority hurdle.
“This is an historic moment for DFA, for the progressive movement, for the Democratic Party, for people-powered politics—and for Bernie supporters who relentlessly rallied over nine intense days to Get Out The Vote and win this pivotal endorsement,” explained Democracy for America’s executive director Charles Chamberlain. “Bernie Sanders is an unyielding populist progressive who decisively won Democracy for America members’ first presidential primary endorsement because of his lifelong commitment to taking on income inequality and the wealthy and powerful interests who are responsible for it.”
Chamberlain explained that “we’ll immediately start organizing on behalf of Bernie in key primary states, from Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada to nearly a dozen states voting on Super Tuesday. We’ll also be building—as Bernie has called for—a political revolution ready to elect populist progressive candidates nationwide to local school boards, city councils, and state legislatures, and all the way up to the US Senate.”
DFA activists will join Sanders backers from groups such as the Working Families Party, Progressive Democrats of America,  Democratic Socialists of America, Friends of the Earth Action, and a pair of key unions: National Nurses United and the American Postal Workers Union.
Most major unions that have issued endorsements are backing Clinton, however, including the powerful National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The former secretary of state, who has a solid lead in national polls, has attracted a number of new union endorsements in recent weeks. In late November, for instance, the Laborers’ International Union of North America endorsed her, as did the Service Employees International Union. “Hillary Clinton has proven she will fight, deliver and win for working families,” said Mary Kay Henry, the international president of SEIU, which in the 2008 primary season backed Barack Obama over Clinton.
Historically, the Communications Workers union, might have been expected to join those other large labor organizations in backing the front-runner. A major presence in states across the country, which represents 700,000 workers in telecommunications, media, airlines, higher education, healthcare, public service and manufacturing, the CWA is one of the largest unions in the national AFL-CIO (which has not made an endorsement) and in state and local labor federations. On Thursday, however, CWA National President Chris Shelton announced that “CWA members have made a clear choice and a bold stand in endorsing Bernie Sanders for President. I am proud of our democratic process, proud of CWA members, and proud to support the candidate whose vision for America puts working families first. Our politics and economy have favored Wall Street, the wealthy and powerful for too long. CWA members, like voters across America, are saying we can no longer afford business as usual. Bernie has called for a political revolution—and that is just what Americans need today.”
The CWA endorsement followed a three-month process that included hundreds of meetings with union members in their workplaces and an online endorsement survey that CWA officials say attracted tens of thousands of votes.
“Bernie Sanders stands with working families against corporate greed, against Wall Street and the big banks, against politics as usual. He stands against the flood of money in politics that’s corrupting our democracy and attacking the right to vote. He knows that we have to take on the rich and powerful special interests to turn around this economy and end the 40 years of stagnant wages that working families have endured,” Shelton said of the decision to endorse. “He’s the candidate who can do it, and we are going to help him. When CWA endorses a candidate it is just the beginning. Our 700,000 members are fired up, and we are going to work overtime to elect Bernie Sanders as the next President of the United States.”
Like other major unions, CWA has a history of active political engagement in states across the country. In the 2012 presidential election, the union maintained politically potent ground operations in 38 states, and union officials note that “CWA has more than 300,000 active and retired members in the states that will hold primaries between now and April 1.”
No matter who wins the Democratic nomination in 2016, it is expected that the candidate will rely on that ground operation in the November race against the Republican nominee. But, for now, CWA is with Sanders, who enthusiastically accepted the union’s endorsement Thursday, telling CWA members, “Brothers and sisters, let me thank the 700,000 members of the Communications Workers of America for their strong support. For decades you’ve been fighting for the rights of working families and I’m so proud today to be with you in that fight.”
Copyright © 2014 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. Distributed by Agence Global.
'You can’t level the playing field with Wall Street banks and billionaires by taking their money'
 
December 17, 2015
by Sarah Lazare, staff writer
Common Dreams
The Bernie Sanders campaign announced Thursday that the Vermont senator has officially received two million contributions, putting him ahead—at this point in the election season—of every other candidate in U.S. history who was not a sitting president.

Top aides say Sanders could even beat President Barack Obama's 2012 record. "In his run for a second term, reports indicated Obama receiving around 2.2 million contributions by the end of 2011, a figure Sanders still could surpass," reads a campaign statement.

The average donation this week was $20, in what Sanders says is evidence that he is accountable to "people power"—not corporate contributors.

The number of contributions does not reflect the exact number of donors, as some have given more than once. However, Sanders' campaign says the number of people pitching in is approaching 1 million, according to the Washington Post.

"Just 261 Sanders backers have given the maximum allowable contribution of $2,700, accounting for a mere 1.7 percent of his campaign’s total reported money raised," said Sanders' campaign. "That’s a sharp contrast to Hillary Clinton’s 17,575 maxed-out donors, whose donations accounted for almost 62 percent of her money raised, according to Federal Election Commission records for the first three quarters of this year."

Filings from Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton show that she continues to be the favorite Democratic candidate of Wall Street, Politico noted in October.

"Over 2 million contributions have been made to the only campaign that rejects a corrupt campaign finance system," Sanders said in an advertisement thanking donors. "You can’t level the playing field with Wall Street banks and billionaires by taking their money."

Meanwhile, a poll released Thursday by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps and Every Voice found that 72 percent of people in the U.S. "favor a plan to address the role of money in politics with a small-donor public financing system combined with disclosure for all political spending by outside groups and strictly enforced election laws," according to a press statement.

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