Sanders’s suit against DNC still alive in federal court

Bernie Sanders’s lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee (DNC) over access to party data is still active in federal court despite the two sides reaching an agreement over the weekend. 

While the DNC agreed to restore the Sanders team’s access as it investigates how the campaign improperly obtained data belonging to presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, a federal district court sent the committee a summons on Monday giving it three weeks to respond to the lawsuit.   

While the main prong of the case — access to the party’s valuable voter data — has been settled, the Sanders suit also claims damages prompted by the negligence of the DNC for hiring a vendor that allowed the security breach to occur in the first place. 

Tad Devine, a Sanders adviser, told The Hill that while attorneys representing both Sanders and the DNC are continuing to negotiate, the lawsuit has not been withdrawn.

“My understanding is that while the original complaint was seeking injunctive relief, which was not necessary once the parties agreed, there is a contractual dispute,” he said Monday. 

“The current status of that is that the attorneys on both sides are speaking to one another, [and] on the basis of their discussions, we will make a decision on how we want to move forward.” 

A DNC official would not comment on the pending litigation, only reiterating that the Sanders campaign cooperated with its investigation by providing the party with data it requested on Friday, which led to it restoring access to the data.

Campaign staff dueled through the media over the weekend about the situations.

{mosads}Team Sanders bashed the DNC for overreacting, accusing the party of restricting its access to the data in an overt attempt to help Clinton. Meanwhile, Clinton’s spokesman chided the Sanders campaign as going  “hog-wild, downloading as much data as they could get” during the vulnerability and questioning whether the Sanders campaign committed a crime. 

The Sanders campaign fired its national data director and suspended two others in the wake of the data breach. According to The New York Times, audit logs showed that three other campaign aides made at least 25 searches of Clinton’s data.

The candidates took a muted approach on the debate stage Saturday night, where Sanders apologized for the breach and Clinton accepted, calling for the two candidates to move on from the issue.

On Sunday, however, Sanders argued that the DNC was not treating him fairly and, as his campaign had contended on Friday, he blamed the data vendor for the breach.

“As a result of a breach caused by the DNC vendor, not by us, information came into our campaign about the Clinton campaign,” he said on “Meet the Press.”

“We did not go out and take it.”