Sanders supporters have long charged that Hillary Clinton’s former campaign co-chair and current head of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, rigged the debate schedule to protect Hillary Clinton from scrutiny and deprive any challengers of a spotlight. But she has stupidly made Sunday’s debate must-see TV by trying to use the DNC to back Hillary Clinton even more blatantly.
Some people claimed that Sanders supporters were just conspiracy theorists. But given how badly the DNC will lose in court and how blatantly the DNC has breached its contract with the Sanders campaign, DWS has shown her true colors to anyone who looks at the facts.
The facts are in the Sanders campaign’s lawsuit, which has been filed. It’s a doozy. The Sanders campaign is filing for an injunction and has is suing the DNC for damages. The DNC will lose, possibly within hours, because of this, in paragraph b of section 5, Term and Termination:
Either party may terminate this Agreement in the event that the other party breaches this Agreement; the non-breaching party sends written notice to the breaching party describing the breach; and the breaching party does not cure the breach to the satisfaction of the non-breaching party within ten (10) calendar days following its receipt of such notice.
The DNC would have to give the Sanders campaign 10 days’ notice. It didn’t. As the lawsuit says:
14) The Agreement does not permit either Party to suspend its performance of the Agreement prior to terminating the Agreement in accordance with the provision above.
15) The Agreement does not permit either Party to terminate or suspend the Agreement without notice, or without providing the breaching Party with the requisite opportunity to cure.
DWS acted in breach of contract. Slam dunk.
But even with 10 days notice, the DNC still can’t terminate the contract because the Sanders campaign did not violate its terms:
17) The Agreement further requires the DNC to “take all measures necessary to protect the secrecy of, and to avoid disclosure and unauthorized use of” confidential information disclosed by the Campaign to the DNC (“Confidential Information”). Agreement, ¶ 7(a). Pursuant to the Agreement, the DNC undertakes to “immediately notify the Campaign in the event of any unauthorized use or disclosure of the [Campaign’s] Confidential Information including the full extent of the time, place and manner of the use or disclosure and the corrective steps taken by the DNC to address the unauthorized use or disclosure.” Id.
18) Upon information and belief, the DNC has executed similar agreements with other candidates’ political campaigns (“Voter Data Agreements”), requiring the DNC to safeguard Confidential Information that might be disclosed by those campaigns. Though the Agreement disclaims that the “DNC may provide its services to other individuals or entities,” the Agreement clearly states that “such other independent services shall in no way impair the DNC’s ability to provide its obligations and services to the Campaign pursuant to this Agreement.” Agreement, ¶ 11 (emphasis added).
19) The Agreement does not obligate the Campaign to maintain specific security measures with respect to Confidential Information, to notify the DNC of security breaches arising in the DNC’s Voter Data systems, or to protect any confidential information inadvertently disclosed to the Campaign by the DNC.
Translation:
17) The DNC is responsible for data security.
18) Services provided to other campaigns can’t affect the services provided to the Sanders campaign, meaning that the a breach in the security of the Clinton campaign’s data is not relevant to the DNC’s obligations to the Sanders campaign.
19) The security of the Clinton campaign’s data isn’t the Sanders’ campaign’s problem—the Sanders campaign is under no obligation to protect the Clinton campaign’s data.
Or, in legalese:
28) The Campaign’s inadvertent access of the Disclosed Information did not constitute a breach of any provision of the Agreement. Even assuming, arguendo, that the DNC could prove that Campaign staff intentionally accessed any Disclosed Information, such access would not amount to a breach of the Agreement, or give the DNC cause to suspend or terminate the Agreement.
29) To the extent that the DNC is obligated to protect the Confidential Information of the other campaigns by virtue of Voter Data Agreements separately executed with those campaigns, it is the DNC and not the Campaign that is in breach of those contractual duties. The Campaign should not be punished for the carelessness of the DNC and its third-party vendor.
30) Whatever duties the DNC may have to protect the Confidential Information of the Competing Campaign, the DNC’s Agreement with the Campaign clearly states that these obligations “shall in no way impair the DNC’s ability to provide its obligations and services to the Campaign pursuant to this Agreement.” Agreement, ¶ 12.
Emphasis added.
What takes this beyond DWS’s stupidity at not checking with DNC lawyers before locking out the Sanders campaign is the fact that in 2008, there was another data breach and one of the campaigns received data it should not have. I guess I don’t have to tell you which campaign that was or what the consequences were, do I?
But for the record, it was the Clinton campaign and it was not penalized:
23) Upon information and belief, a similar security incident arose with the NGP VAN software during the 2008 national presidential primaries, resulting in the unintentional transmission of Confidential Information to the campaign of Democratic primary candidate Hillary Clinton (the “Prior Incident”).
By the way, this could get very expensive for the DNC at trial—yes, this is a lawsuit and in case the DNC chooses to take it to trial, the lawsuit begins by setting out how the campaign is being irreparably damaged:
Upon information and belief, Plaintiff is sustaining irrrepable injury and financial losses as a result of Defendant’s ongoing breach of the Parties’ Agreement Regarding Use of DNC National Voter File Data (the “Agreement”) that are incapable of precise calculation, but exceed $600,000.00 per day.
More than $600,000 per day? This is going to get very expensive for the DNC very quickly. Good thing they have all that super-pac money. How did the Sanders campaign arrive at that figure? I’m glad you asked:
9) The Voter Data is vital to the fundraising and voter identification efforts of all presidential candidates – but it is especially critical to the Campaign, which has been financed primarily with contributions from individual donors rather than Political Action Committees (“PACs”).
10) In a fundraising drive conducted between December 14, 2015 and December 16, 2015, the Campaign raised more than $2,400,000.00. Most of this money came from individual donors identified through, inter alia, the strategic use of Voter Data.
Emphasis added.
UPDATE: The Sanders campaign’s court filing and contract with the DNC can be found here. Read it yourself if you don’t believe me.
UPDATE II: I’m going to bed. It’s late over here. The Sanders court filing is an easy read. I recommend it.
Saturday, Dec 19, 2015 · 10:09:45 PM +00:00 · expatjourno
UPDATE III: What was viewed and possibly why. No confidential lists of names were downloaded, according to the vendor.
There’s a lot of talk about what the Sanders campaign accessed and why. Among other things, the Sanders campaign staff were attempting to determine how much of the Sanders info was visible to the Clinton campaign. The only way for them to do that was to explore the Clinton campaign’s info.
Now, according to the vendor, the Clinton campaign did not access the Sanders campaign’s information. Even assuming that is true, the Sanders campaign could not have known that at the time.
Some people also keep claiming that the Sanders campaign downloaded Clinton campaign files. As markthshark points out in a comment below:
The bug allowed users who already had access to voters’ files to search by and view—though not export, save, or act on—attributes added to those files by other campaigns.
The link to the story is in Mark’s comment.
Sybil Liberty also points out that, according to the vendor itself, only a summary of the data was downloaded. From NGP VAN’s blog:
First, a one page-style report containing summary data on a list was saved out of VoteBuilder by one Sanders user. This is what some people have referred to as the “export” from VoteBuilder. As noted below, users were unable to export lists of people.
NGP VAN also says on its blog:
Second, there has been independent confirmation that NGP VAN has not received previous notice of a data breach regarding NGP VAN. Josh Uretsky, former National Data Director for the Sanders campaign confirmed on MSNBC (at 5:47), and also on CNN, regarding the previous incident: “it wasn’t actually within the VAN VoteBuilder system, it was another system.”
I hope these statements from the vendor set the record straight once and for all.