A staffer at the center of a data breach that has Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign sparring with the Democratic Party says he was simply trying to expose a bug while logging into private files for Hillary Clinton's camp.
Josh Uretsky was fired as the national data director for the Sanders campaign on Friday.
Speaking with NBC10 in Philadelphia Friday night, he acknowledged accessing a Democratic National Committee (DNC) database containing voter information belonging to the Clinton campaign. But the 39-year-old said he did it to make a record of a software glitch that gave all campaigns access to each other's records.
"I deliberately left all of the data that I was accessing, all the voter file data that I was accessing, in the DNC's systems so that once the bug was reported, discovered and closed down, they had access to those files. They could use it to see the scope of the issue," Uretsky said at Philadelphia International Airport after returning home from New Hampshire.
Three other Sanders campaign employees also accessed the files, the Sanders campaign acknowledged. Campaign officials haven't yet decided if they'll be disciplined.
The database, run by technology firm NGP VAN for the DNC, houses voter data for the presidential hopefuls.
NGP VAN audit documents obtained by NBC News showed four Sanders staffers spent about 40 minutes searching through lists of Clinton supporters in 10 early voting states. Sanders documents were also accessed. The files were saved to personal folders, the documents showed.
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Uretsky said he looked at files to make "sure it was not our data" and the way he did that could be "misconstrued as a download."
"I tried to do what I did in a very transparent manner," he said. "I was trying very deliberately to leave a trail of what I was doing and what had happened and what was exposed."
Clinton's campaign maintained their data was stolen. In response, the DNC revoked the Sanders camp's access to the database until an investigation is conducted.
"The Sanders campaign staff chose to view and download data that did not belong to them," DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schutlz said on MSNBC Friday night.
She also said that the campaign had yet to provide the DNC with evidence it no longer had any of the Clinton campaign's data.
Jeff Weaver, Sanders' campaign director, called the staffers' actions inappropriate, but said shutting them out from the database was unjust. "We are running a clean campaign," he said.
The Sanders campaign filed a federal lawsuit against the DNC on Friday demanding access to the database. The suit maintains the lockout could cost them $600,000 a day in lost donations.
