It is time for the Democratic National Committee to clean house. The actions of Debbie Wasserman Schultz over the last three days have brought chaos and disorder to the party and created a mess that was completely avoidable.
As most everyone now knows, the vendor that controls voter information data for the Democratic campaigns, NGP VAN, had a bit of a SNAFU on Wednesday night during a coding update. The firewall separating each campaign’s data from the other campaigns was dropped for a period of about 45 minutes. This same problem first happened two months ago, and it was the Sanders campaign that alerted officials to the problem. It was Sanders’ data that was exposed in October, and the campaign was assured that the problem would be corrected.
"We are actually very confident that at that time some of our data was lost to one of the other campaigns." --Sanders Campaign Manager Jeff WeaverThe Sanders campaign accepted the damage and moved on, hoping that the DNC would step up oversight of the system. No one alerted the media.
This latest breach, however, was a completely different matter. The firewall dropped again, and again, the Sanders team saw the problem and reported it to officials — but this time, someone called the Washington Post on Wednesday night and said something along the lines of, “I dunno, but it appears that the Sanders campaign just stole voter data from the Clinton campaign.”
By Friday afternoon, Clinton spokesperson Brian Fallon was telling CNN that Sanders’ people “went hog wild, downloading as much data as they could.” DWS appeared on MSBNC’s “All in with Chris Hayes” and immediately sounded like she was still working for the Clinton campaign — her somewhat bizarre assessment of the situation: “It’s as if you found a house with an unlocked front door and instead of locking it and notifying authorities, you went in and you took things. Ransacked the house and took things that didn't belong to you. And then you expect to continue to have access to the house.” I must say, what a nice job of taking responsibility for oversight of the DNC voter information; and great damage control in making this story a blip instead of a blizzard… a n y w a y…. Now that the dust has somewhat settled, it becomes clear that Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s handling of this latest DNC data breach goes beyond mere incompetence. What few people know is how the vendor and the head of the DNC are connected. NGP VAN CEO Stu Trevelyan ”Stu worked directly on a number of campaigns, including working in the 1992 Clinton-Gore "War Room," and then in the Clinton White House.” NGP VAN Founder Nathaniel Pearlman Chief Technology Officer for the Hillary Clinton 2008 campaign NGP VAN Vice President, Creative & Marketing Aharon Wasserman *ahem* — ‘nuff said. DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz ”She previously served in the Florida House of Representatives, the Florida Senate, and was campaign co-chair for Hillary Clinton's 2008 unsuccessful run for President.” The About blurb at the Democratic National Committee’s website says, “Democrats believe that we're greater together than we are on our own—that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules.” If that statement is true, then the time has come to fire Debbie Wasserman Schultz.