Democrat Campaign Breach, Not a Scandal?

Posted by Tina

Good thing Bernie Sanders isn’t a republican president; he’d probably be facing Watergate level hearings about now. a building wasn’t breached but a firewall was, wasn’t it?

David Atkins over at Washington Monthly describes the vulnerabilities of the data bases used by Democrats and the egregious behavior of the Sanders campaign and concludes:

In this context, it made sense for Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC to suspend the Sanders campaign’s access to the data until it could determine the extent of the damage, and the degree to which the Clinton campaign’s private data had been compromised. As it turns out the ethical breach by Sanders operatives was massive, but the actual data discovery was limited. So it made sense and was fairly obvious that the DNC would quickly end up giving the campaign back its NGPVAN access—particularly since failing to do so would be a death sentence for the campaign and a gigantic black eye to the party.

This doesn’t mean that Wasserman-Schultz hasn’t, in David Axelrod’s words, been putting her thumb on the scale on behalf of the Clinton campaign. She clearly has been, judging from the intentionally obfuscated debate schedule and from her demeanor and reaction to this recent controversy. The Democratic Party would have been wiser to bring the campaigns together privately and resolve the matter internally. Instead, Wasserman-Schultz chose to take it public to attempt to embarrass the Sanders campaign, and merely managed to embarrass herself and the Party’s data security vulnerabilities in the process.

Still, the Sanders camp’s reactions have been laughable. It was their team that unethically breached Clinton’s data. It was their comms people who spoke falsely about what happened. The Sanders campaign wasn’t honeypotted into doing it—their people did it of their own accord. NGPVAN isn’t set up to benefit Clinton at Sanders’ expense—and if the violation by the campaigns had been reversed, Sanders supporters would have been claiming a conspiracy from sunrise to sundown. What’s very clear is that the Clinton camp did nothing wrong in any of this. Sanders campaign operatives did, and then Wasserman-Schultz compounded it by overreacting. And in the end, the right thing ended up happening: the lead staffer in question was fired, and the campaign got its data access back.

He the went on to slap the wrists of “armchair activists” who should quit speculating about what’s happening and get involved ” in campaign field activities.” He says this will help to prevent wild conspiracy theories. We won’t take this personally since we are here to discuss that which we find in the news…including Mr. Atkins excellent article.

I’d like to remind Mr. Atkins that the “armchair” class has arisen because of the false characterizations, conspiracy theories and down right lies promulgated by candidates, representatives, the parties and their “involved activists,” particularly on the left a la Alinsky, since Watergate when they found they had an activist media to help them.

Let free expression reign and continue to thrive. Most of us are sincere citizens who are concerned about the state of politics and our nation. We armchair types are what was once called, the silent majority. We are silent no more! The process will sort out the conspiracies and perhaps one day our justice system will again serve up justice as well.