Sanders
ground game led by Soros 'garbage man'
Left-wing revolution echoes grassroots momentum of tea party
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders
Jerome R. Corsi
NEW YORK – In an anti-establishment movement from the left
that bears some organizational resemblance to the tea party on the right,
Democratic Party candidate Bernie Sanders has turned to a George
Soros-sponsored, labor-union organizer and computer hacker to run his
nationwide ground game.
Zack Exley was dubbed by George W. Bush “the garbage man”
after hacking Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign website.
Sanders hired Exley last summer to join his campaign digital
team, Politico reported, noting that “operative” Exley would help the candidate
“secure votes and mobilize volunteers.”
Exley’s history with the far-left of the Democratic Party is
complicated, but it illustrates the dynamics of the chasm developing between
the new Democratic Party voting majority lining up to support Sanders in clear
rejection of the establishment candidate, former first lady, senator and
secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
Many within the Clinton camp suspect Exley is connected to
the international network of computer hackers that exposed Clinton’s private
email server in 2013.
A close examination of Exley’s career and his current role
with the Sanders campaign affirms Sanders’ socialist movement is attempting a
revolution within the Democratic Party to advance the “fundamental change in
America” Barack Obama announced in 2008.
‘The garbage man’
In 1999, the Washington Post reported Exley, as an exercise
in “political satire,” created gwbush.com to mock George W. Bush’s official
presidential campaign website, georgewbush.com. Exley posted on the site a hacked
photograph of Bush with a straw up his nose, inhaling white lines in an obvious
parody to suggest Bush was a drug-user.
Bush, not amused, charged the mock website was produced by
“a garbage man” and filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission,
threatening to sue Exley for using photographs hacked from Bush’s official
campaign website.
In September, the San Francisco website BayAreaForBernie.com reported
Exley had teamed up with Claire Sandberg, another tech team member known for
running a digital campaign against fracking in New York, also hired by Sanders
in August.
Exley and Sandberg were in San Francisco to implement
volunteer management software developed by the Sanders team to recruit campaign
organizers who would operate as self-directed autonomous nodes in a network
structure, not as ground-game operatives managed in a hierarchical, top-down,
pyramid structure.
In November, the Texas Tribune reported Exley and Sandberg
were opening a Sanders campaign headquarters in Austin, where Exley told the
nearly 200 volunteers who showed up at an office-opening meeting that they had
a goal of making 850,000 phone calls to identify Sanders supporters willing to
work to help
Sanders win the March 1 Texas primary.
Exley ties to Hillary’s email scandal
Exley has deep ties to the political operatives who
established and operated the private email server Hillary Clinton utilized
while she served as secretary of state.
After serving as the director of online communications and
online organizing for the unsuccessful 2004 presidential campaign of Sens. John
Kerry and John Edwards, Exley in 2015 co-founded the New Organizing Institute,
NOI, as a think tank to produce computer-savvy field operatives for
left-oriented Democratic Party political campaigns.
Serving with Exley on the advisory board of NOI was
Nathaniel Pearlman, another leftist political operative. In 1997, Pearlman
founded NGP Software Inc., a computer-oriented company organized to provide
political software identifying Democratic voters. The software was used at
various times by Democratic presidential candidates, including former Vermont
governor and DNC chairman Howard Dean, Rep. Richard Gephardt, Kerry, Edwards
and Obama.
Pearlman also served as the chief technology officer for
Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign. Clinton hired
Pearlman and his then-fledging NGP Software in her first 1999 Senate election
campaign to clean up campaign data on donors that had contributed some $30
million. The aim was to produce correctly filed FEC reports and avoid hefty
penalties that could have been used against her in attack ads.
As chief technology officer for Clinton’s 2008 presidential
campaign, Pearlman supervised the campaign’s Internet technology director,
Bryan Pagliano.
Pagliano’s résumé on Linkedin.com notes he worked for
Clinton from 2006-2009. In 2008, he “headed the design and build of the
campaign headquarters’ data center and orchestrated the continuous movement of
technical equipment and staff among nationwide field officers in response to
ever-changing organizational needs.” When Clinton’s presidential campaign
disbanded, Pagliano moved to working for her political action committee.
As reported by the Washington Post in September 2015, Bill
and Hillary Clinton personally paid Pagliano $5,000 for “computer services”
prior to his becoming a State Department employee, according to a financial
disclosure form Pagliano filed in April 2009.
The payment evidently was for establishing a private server
for the Clintons in their home in Chappaqua, New York.
In May 2009, the State Department employed Pagliano as a
special adviser.
The Washington Post article further established that even
after he became a State Department employee, the Clintons continued paying
Pagliano privately to maintain the private server for Hillary Clinton. Pagliano
neglected to list the outside income in the required financial disclosures he
filed with the State Department each year until the State Department concluded
his full-time employment in February 2013, coincident with Hillary Clinton’s
departure as secretary of state.
In 2013, after Clinton’s private email server was exposed by
Romanian hacker Marcel-Leher Lazar, known as “Guccifer,” Pearlman recommended
Clinton should move her private email server out of the Chappaqua home.
The company chosen was the relatively small and largely
unknown Denver-based Platte River Networks, where vice president David
DeCamillis was a 1983 graduate of Boulder High School, the same high school
from which Pearlman graduated the following year.
On Sept. 10, 2015, after he became a target of the FBI
investigation into Hillary’s private email server, Pagliano asserted his Fifth
Amendment privilege not to answer questions in a closed-door session with the
House Select Committee on Benghazi.
Breach of Hillary’s voting data
In December, the New York Times reported the Sanders
campaign’s firing of Josh Uretsky, its national data director, after serving
less than four complete months. The firing made public a fight between the
Sanders campaign and the leadership of the DNC supporting Hillary Clinton.
ABC News reported Uretsky was fired after accessing without
authorization a DNC-maintained voter data belonging to the Clinton campaign.
“The DNC was notified on Wednesday by its data systems
vendor NGP VAN that as a result of a software patch, all users on the system
across Democratic campaigns were inadvertently able to access some data
belonging to other campaigns for a brief window,” DNC spokesman Luis Miranda
told ABC News in a statement. “The DNC immediately directed NGP VAN to conduct
a thorough analysis to identify any users who accessed the data, what actions
they took in the system, and to report on the findings to the Party and any
affected campaign.”
The back story is that in 2010, NGP, the voter data company
started by Pearlman in 1997, merged with the Voice Activation Network to form
NGP VAN.
Then, in 2011, NGP acquired the Voice Activation Network to
become NGP VAN. In 2013, NGP VAN acquired National Field, a voter-data startup
launched out of the 2008 Obama presidential campaign.
According to the NGP VAN website, NGP VAN is currently the
architect of the DNC “Vote Builder” database that was being used at the time of
the data breach that got Uretsky fired.
The New York Times further reported in December that in
retaliation for the data breach, the DNC, instead of disciplining NGP VAN for
careless handling of the “Voter Builder” database, acted swiftly to deny the
Sanders campaign future access to the Democratic Party’s 50-state voter file,
which contains information about millions of Democrats and “is invaluable to
campaigns on a daily basis.”
In response, Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager, held a
press conference in which he charged the DNC was trying to help the Clinton
campaign by cutting the Sanders’ campaign off from the NGP VAN-driven “Voter
Builder” database.
On Dec. 19, after the Sanders campaign filed a lawsuit
against the DNC, the DNC reversed course and restored the Sanders campaign
access to the voter database.
Still, supporters of the Sanders campaign charged the DNC
with a set-up. They argued that Uretsky was recommended to the Sanders campaign
both by the DNC and NGP VAN, fueling suspicion the “data breach” was engineered
by the DNC and the Clinton campaign to sabotage the Sanders campaign. The
theory was that the DNC entrapped Sanders campaign IT managers like Uretsky
into a data breach that would justify the DNC cutting the Sanders campaign from
access to the voter data base during the critical lead-up to the Iowa and New
Hampshire primaries.
Probing deeper, the database Obama’s presidential campaign
utilized in 2012 to defeat GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney was not the NGA
VAN database developed by Pearlman, a Clinton partisan, but by Catalyst, a
progressive voter database that supplies data to NGA VAN and consists of data
on virtually every adult in the United States.
Borrowing from the “leaderless” organizational structures of
far-left movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter, the Sanders campaign is
buying voter data from Catalyst and seeding it into a self-directed volunteer
software Exley developed for Sanders. It’s an approach consistent with the
grassroots revolution Sanders is funding largely with small-dollar
contributions from millions of average Americans.
“Bernie is committed to not taking big money, and while that
means he doesn’t have the financial resources to create a hierarchical
organization, he does have the people resources to foster a team-based (or
horizontal) organization,” wrote the editors of “Bay Area for Bernie,”
reflecting on Exley’s recent campaign organizing trip to California.
“The costs of this structure are that it’s difficult
(although not impossible) to scale, authority and decision-making ability is
disseminated among many groups and individuals, and it requires a team culture
to function well. But that’s what we’re shooting for, right?” the San Francisco
editors for Sanders noted. “A grassroots political revolution on the Left is
going to require us to work together as a team.”
A Soros-funded career
After his career as an “Internet explorer, prankster and
organizer,” Exley became the “organizing director” for the George Soros-funded
MoveOn.org, serving in that capacity for one year and three months, according
to his résumé published at Linkedin.com.
David Horowitz’s website DiscoverTheNetworks.org notes that
not long after Exley joined MoveOn.org, he had an opportunity to return to his
“satire” hijinks, as MoveOn.org launched a contest encouraging its members to
produce negative ads about President Bush. It resulted in two ads posted on the
MoveOn.org website that co-mingled images of Bush with Adolf Hitler, for which
Exley refused to apologize.
As a fellow of the Open Society Institute founded by Soros
in 1993, Exley wrote a series of articles starting in 2009 that drew far-left
organizing lessons from the labor-union movement and the 2008 Obama
presidential campaign.
“After graduating from the University of Massachusetts,
Exley began his career attending a training program run by the AFL-CIO, after
which he took a job with the United Auto Workers,” wrote staff writer Joseph
Menn in a 2004 Los Angeles Times article profiling Exley as he teamed up with
the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign.
“For seven months, he worked undercover at a Michigan auto
parts factory,” Menn continued. “The unionization effort there failed, but
Exley later used a team of infiltrators to successfully organize large nursing
homes in Minnesota.
“Exley’s unlikely rise from union organizer and small-time
software programmer to top campaign operative mirrors the rapidly expanding
role of the Internet in politics,” Menn noted. “More valuable than decades of
slogging in the trenches of the major parties is a few years’ experience out in
the free-form world of the Web – a realm where the tools of the trade evolve
every week and a joke can grab more attention than a thousand position papers.”
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