A top campaign aide for Bernie Sanders is accusing the Democratic National Committee (DNC) of hypocrisy in its handling of a data breach that roiled the party’s presidential primary.
The unnamed Sanders adviser told Yahoo News that Josh Uretsky, the staffer who was fired for the breach, was recommended by people close to the DNC and NGP VAN, the technology firm the party hired to run its voter file.
{mosads}“It’s not as if we conjured this guy Josh from thin air,” said the adviser.
One person who recommended Uretsky to the Sanders campaign was DNC National Data Director Andrew Brown, who is closely involved with the party’s voter file program, the aide said.
“I just think it’s utter hypocrisy on their part,” said the official. “I mean here we are being attacked for the behavior of an individual, which we ultimately fired. We agree he acted improperly, but it’s just amazing to me that this … individual that actually caused this trouble in our campaign was recommended by these guys.”
The latest accusations from the Sanders campaign could escalate its public feud Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton and the DNC.
Sanders found himself in hot water after it was discovered last week that a staffer, later identified as Uretsky, accessed proprietary voter information belonging to the Clinton campaign. The data was reportedly made available due to a glitch in the shared voter file system maintained by NGP VAN.
The DNC responded by cutting off Sanders’s access to the database, and the Clinton campaign reacted angrily, calling it an “egregious breach of data and ethics” by Sanders’s staff.
The Sanders campaign fired Uretsky and suspended two other staffers. The DNC restored access to the voter file about a day later, after the Sanders campaign filed a lawsuit against the party organization.
Sanders’s campaign has used the incident to accuse the DNC of tilting the playing field toward Clinton, the establishment favorite.
The DNC and Brown declined to comment to Yahoo.