When Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign team was about to address a throng of media about a breach in which his data director and at least two other staff members accessed Hillary Clinton’s proprietary voter data, reporters and political watchers braced for some sort of apology.
Instead, the campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, stood before the cameras and portrayed his campaign as victims of a voracious Democratic National Committee. He threatened to sue to party to restore its access to its own voter file data, which the party had suspended access as it investigated what had happened. The D.N.C. had refused to provide them with tools to investigate the issue themselves, the Sanders campaign claims, while the Clinton campaign had access to audit logs of the breach. In one fell swoop, the Sanders team had painted itself as the victim of the Democratic establishment.
The aggressive maneuver struck many political observers as daring. It caught Mrs. Clinton’s campaign by surprise, which believed the basic facts of what had happened would speak for themselves. But the person delivering the message, Mr. Weaver, is a long-trusted adviser to Mr. Sanders, who has developed a reputation inside and outside his campaign as a hard-charging operative often willing to go further than the candidate himself, with his handling of the data breach one more instance of top Sanders advisers getting under the skin of the Clinton campaign.
“Jeff is a Marine,” said Michael Briggs, the spokesman for Mr. Sanders, when asked about Mr. Weaver’s tone. “You wouldn’t want to be in a foxhole with anybody else.” Mr. Weaver declined to be interviewed.
He added, “Is Bernie nicer than Jeff and me? I’ll grant you that.” But “like others he is sometimes very protective” of Mr. Sanders, Mr. Briggs said, noting that Mr. Weaver had “put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into the effort” of the Sanders presidential bid.
Mark Longabaugh and Tad Devine, business partners and senior advisers to Mr. Sanders, also defended Mr. Weaver’s methods. The campaign “won the day” after the data breach, Mr. Longabaugh said, because Mr. Weaver had made the right call. Mr. Weaver’s allies suggested that he had an unflinching ability to detect a rival’s weak spot, and pounce.
Bill Clinton has privately told friends he was astonished by the Sanders’ team’s handling of the data breach, and that it risked depicting the Vermont senator as a typical politician and not the political outsider he is seen to be.
Mr. Weaver, who worked for Mr. Sanders in Congress for years and has the candidate’s trust, took a break from a store in Virginia, Victory Comics, to return to the candidate’s fold (his cell phone voicemail still identifies him as with the comic-book store.) Mr. Weaver has become the most visible of a small handful of top advisers to Mr. Sanders who have, in a series of interviews, denounced Mrs. Clinton and pushed back angrily at some of her campaign’s critiques of their candidate. They ran, and then took down, a negative digital ad after reporters questioned how that fit into the candidate’s pledge not to run negative ads. And more recently, an unidentified Sanders campaign adviser told Yahoo News that the Sanders campaign’s fired data director had actually been recommended by the party committee, suggesting that raised more questions about what had gone wrong and how it was that Mrs. Clinton’s data was visible by the Sanders team.
Some of Mr. Sanders’ campaign aides were troubled by the claim, and felt it reflected a misstep by the top advisers. Mr. Sanders at times has urged a few top aides to tone down their language, but he also believes that the campaign is being treated unfairly by the media.
The sparring between the campaigns reflects other underlying tensions between the Clinton and Sanders camps.
Mr. Sanders’ aides were genuinely incensed when Mrs. Clinton invoked sexism after Mr. Sanders spoke generally about people “shouting” on the issue of gun control, and believed she was twisting his words.
But the question of sexist language came back to haunt the Sanders campaign internally after the first debate, when Mr. Weaver appeared to be condescending toward Mrs. Clinton in an October interview with Bloomberg Politics.
“Look, she’d make a great vice president,” Mr. Weaver said. “We’re willing to give her more credit than Obama did. We’re willing to consider her for vice president. We’ll give her serious consideration. We’ll even interview her.”
The blowback outside the campaign was fierce. But there was also blowback within the Sanders campaign as well, as some aides said the language crossed a line. Mr. Sanders said on MSNBC that the comment “was inappropriate,” although it is not clear whether he suggested that Mr. Weaver apologize.
However, others in the campaign did. The Sanders campaign’s New Hampshire state director, Julia Barnes, asked Mr. Weaver to apologize for the comments, and voiced her displeasure to him in clear terms. He never did, telling unhappy staffers on a conference call after the report aired that their team needed to be mindful that the Clinton campaign was about to unleash attacks on Mr. Sanders, according to three people with direct knowledge of the episode.
Mr. Briggs declined to discuss the incident, saying he wouldn’t discuss his campaign’s conference calls. Ms. Barnes did not respond to a request for comment.
As for the Sanders campaign’s approach to the party committee, people briefed on the flap about the number of debates believe that Mr. Sanders has fed on outrage against the D.N.C. that was created by others, not his own team, in efforts to deal with the data issue. These people described Mr. Sanders’ team as decidedly less emphatic in private discussions about having more primary debates than they have been in public, realizing that debates are not his strength.
Mr. Briggs denied that claim. But in an interview on MSNBC on Tuesday morning, Martin O’Malley, the low-polling Democrat who has pushed the hardest for more debates, seemed to confirm that Mr. Sanders had not been aggressively seeking to buck the party establishment.
“I asked Senator Sanders” to do more, said Mr. O’Malley. “Senator Sanders didn’t want to do more debates either. He kind of liked where it is.”
Aides to Mr. Sanders said they couldn’t speak to Mr. O’Malley’s assertion, although Mr. Briggs said the team would “welcome more debates” that included Mrs. Clinton as well.
For now, the Clinton team is still surprised to find itself playing defense over the data breach. Days after the breach, a bemused Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” about Mr. Sanders, “I think he’s got a problem in his campaign with the culture of that campaign and I think that was shown in this incident. And I think that we are the victims of this, not the Sanders campaign.”
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