Bernie Sanders presidential campaign has been “temporarily suspended” after Sanders national data director, Josh Uretsky, who was recently fired; and one staffer is known to have accessed and/or viewed the voter files of Hillary Clinton. This is a direct violation of the prohibitive rules regarding one campaign accessing the proprietary information of another campaign.

There was a brief breach on the NPG VAN vendor software that manages the DNC’s voter files on last Wednesday and during that time, the firewall was temporarily down as Clinton’s information was accessed by a few staffers on Sanders’ team.

According to Debbie Wasserman Schultz, congressional representative for Florida’s 23rd and what many Democrats regard as a “blue dog” who works inside the DNC for the Republican Party, “…We have the ability to suspend that campaign’s access to the voter file in order to make sure that we can preserve the integrity of the voter file and ensure that there is confidence in it…”

Supporters of the Sanders campaign and MoveOn.org balked at Wasserman Schultz’s decision to suspend the Sanders campaign on Friday; however, a MoveOn.org petition says, “Withholding access to this critical information at such a critical time for the campaign is equivalent to sabotage.”

Wasserman Schultz said “We would expect the DNC to suspend the Clinton campaign if Sanders’ files had been accessed…I am exploring what options are available to us, but until I am fully advised by independent experts how best to approach this, as quickly as possible, the only available remedy for us is to make sure that we cannot have the information manipulated. And the only way to do that is to temporarily suspend access to the voter file.”

Uretsky claimed not to have saved any of the viewed data, and stated that this kind of thing has happened before; but Wasserman Schultz indicated that the Clinton data had not only been accessed, but exported and downloaded.

Sanders’ supporters weighed in on the fact that a petition is now circulating to have Wasserman Schultz fired over what they have deemed to be a “lie.”

Facebooker Jane Mayer says “We need a non-biased leader of the DNC…Not one who plays favorites and attempts to use a lie to remove campaign data from access by the leading candidate of the people…. leading candidate of the whole campaign. Shame on Schultzie for trying to land blows as if she were the arbiter of all things political… and without reasonable excuse for withdrawing their own data from them.”

Another Facebooker, Andrea Burlingame, says “It seems to me the media is trying to create a bigger Bruhaha than exists in reality. Go figure. Also, it also seems clear that the intent was to expose the glitch in the firewall, and that the Sanders staffers not only knew the DNC could see what they were doing, but hoped they would see it and fix the problem. The interviewer doesn’t seem to want to even entertain that scenario, but keeps interrupting to get a response about his preferred scenario. Ugh!”

Do you believe the Sanders’ staffer was blowing the whistle on the momentary glitch in order to let them know the firewall was breached; or was the staffer happy for the opportunity to glance and pounced while there was time?

How do you think this action will impact the Bernie Sanders campaign overall?