Debbie Wasserman Schultz Is Acting Just Like the Villain Bernie Sanders Says She Is

From Slate today:

Debbie Wasserman Schultz Is Acting Just Like the Villain Bernie Sanders Says She Is

Subtitle:

The DNC’s heavy-handed response to the data breach is just its most recent sign of incompetence.

Sen. Bernie Sanders had been having a lovely little week. He scored the endorsements of both the Communications Workers of America union and the progressive grass-roots group Democracy for America. On Thursday, his campaign announced that it had received more than 2 million donations. “We are enormously proud,” Sanders said in a statement, “that we have received more individual contributions at this point in the campaign than any candidate who is not an incumbent president.” The campaign said on Thursday that it had raised more than $3 million in contributions since Monday.

But by Friday morning, the Sanders campaign found itself locked out of the Democratic National Committee’s 50-state voter file and its own proprietary voter information that it maintains on the DNC’s platform.

The DNC suspended the campaign from access after a software glitch on the system, run by the vendor NGP VAN, broke down the “firewalls” between each campaign’s information and some number of Sanders campaign tech employees breached and downloaded some of Hillary Clinton’s campaign’s data. The Sanders campaign fired its national data director on the spot and is doing an internal investigation of its staffers’ activities.

The Sanders campaign is reacting to the DNC’s incredibly punitive response as another instance of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s DNC treating all non-Clinton presidential campaigns unfairly and generally making a mess of the primary process. This shouldn’t excuse the members of the Sanders campaign who did, in fact, screw up. The campaign should come fully clean about what proprietary Clinton campaign information they do or don’t have.

But do they have a case that Wasserman Schultz’s DNC has generally facilitated the Clinton campaign throughout the cycle? Oh God, yes, and it’s no shock that the Sanders campaign and its supporters are treating this as a declaration of war.