DNC blocks Sanders campaign from accessing voter database after campaign staffers take a peek at Hillary Clinton campaign info. Sanders campaign responds, "We don't need dirty tricks."

Courtesy of CNN:

The Democratic National Committee is cutting Bernie Sanders off from a crucial voter database after the party organization said the Vermont senator's presidential campaign took advantage of a software error to access confidential voter information collected by Hillary Clinton's team. 

The revelation is emerging ahead of the third Democratic presidential debate of the campaign season on Saturday night and poses a major setback for Sanders, who is mounting a liberal challenge to Clinton. The database is a goldmine of information about voters and being blocked from it could complicate Sanders' outreach efforts. The timing is also challenging, just weeks before Clinton and Sanders are slated to compete in the Iowa caucuses.

I saw DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz on TV today acknowledging that the Sanders campaign had fired one staffer over this breach, but that more than one accessed the data, and that the data had been downloaded.

However the Sanders campaign is outraged at what they see as an unnecessarily punitive response by the DNC.

Courtesy of Salon:  

Vowing to not allow the Democratic National Committee to “sabatoge” their campaign, senior Bernie Sanders campaign operatives announced Friday afternoon that they planned to sue the Party if it continued to lock out the campaign from its own voter files. 

The DNC is “actively attempting to undermine our campaign,” Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver charged during a press conference in Washington, D.C. this afternoon. “If the DNC continues to hold our data hostage, and continues to try to attack the heart and soul of our campaign, we will be in federal court this afternoon seeking an immediate injunction,” Weaver threatened. 

“We are running a clean campaign. We are going to beat Secretary Clinton,” Weaver assured reporters at Friday’s press conference, explaining that “in the heat of these campaigns sometimes young people make misjudgments.” 

“We don’t need dirty tricks,” he asserted. “To do that we are going to need our data, which has been stolen by the DNC.” Weaver slammed the DNC for what he called an “inappropriate overreaction,” threatening to head to “federal court this afternoon seeking an immediate injunction,” if the DNC does not reinstate the campaign’s access to the database.

I think most of us are willing to give Bernie Sanders and his campaign the benefit of the doubt here.

This does not sound in the least like something Bernie would have engaged in, and I doubt that he would excuse this kind of behavior from his staffers.

After all Bernie's main selling point is his unshakable integrity, so I have to agree with his campaign on this one and think the DNC needs to back off and stop being so transparently in Hillary's corner.

Actually if you agree with me on that there is a petition you can sign.