Bernie Sanders ends lawsuit against DNC over voter data breach

While both sides continue to blame the other, Sen. Bernard Sanders’ campaign on Friday withdrew a lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee, ending a monthslong controversy over unauthorized access to voter data files that had driven a wedge between the Vermont senator and party leadership.

The lawsuit stemmed from an incident last year in which the DNC temporarily shut off the Sanders campaign’s access to voter data files. That move was retaliation after Sanders staffers accessed data belonging to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, sparking a bitter fight between the two sides that fed into the narrative that the DNC was actively favoring Mrs. Clinton over Mr. Sanders.

While the DNC quickly restored access after Mr. Sanders filed a lawsuit, the Sanders camp pressed ahead with its legal challenge, saying it had been treated unfairly and had been politically damaged by losing access to voter data files.

Following an independent investigation commissioned by the DNC and the Sanders campaign, Mr. Sanders withdrew the lawsuit Friday and claimed that the inquiry vindicated his team.

“Four months later, an independent investigation of the firewall failures in the DNC’s shared voter file database has definitively confirmed that the original claims by the DNC and the Clinton campaign were wholly inaccurate — the Sanders campaign never ’stole’ any voter file data; the Sanders campaign never ’exported’ unauthorized voter file data; and the Sanders campaign certainly never had access to the Clinton campaign’s ’strategic road map,’” the Sanders campaign said in a statement.

The campaign added that four staffers had “extremely short-lived access for one hour” to Clinton campaign information, but blamed the incident on “data security failures” within the DNC system.

The Sanders campaign and the DNC retained the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to conduct the investigation.

In its own statement, the DNC admitted there was a “flaw in system security” that allowed the Sanders campaign to gain access, but it still seemed to place the blame on the senator and his staff.

It also said the investigation found more than two-dozen searches of Clinton data by Sanders staffers.

“The four [Sanders campaign] users conducted 25 searches using proprietary Hillary for America score data across 11 states. All of the results of these searches were saved within the VoteBuilder system, with the exception of one instance where a user exported a statistical summary of a search using [Clinton campaign] scoring in New Hampshire,” the DNC said. “CrowdStrike found no evidence of unauthorized access by the Hillary for America or O’Malley for President campaigns. Today, the Sanders campaign also voluntarily dismissed the breach of contract action pending against the DNC.”