McCain Campaign Sells Blackberry — Forgets To Wipe Memory

Chris Jones — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 23:07:39 +0000

Even in its now defunct state, the McCain campaign is continuing its pattern of incompetence and disorganization.

Private information at bargain prices. It was a high-tech flub at the McCain-Palin campaign headquarters in Arlington when Fox 5’s Investigative Reporter Tisha Thompson bought a Blackberry device containing confidential campaign information.

…We saw laptops ranging between $400 and $600 with logins like “WARROOM08.” We couldn’t log on without a password, but staffers assured us the hard drive would be zapped before it was sold, and the computer would probably work.

The hottest item? Blackberry phones at $20 a piece. There were only 10 left. All of the batteries had died. There were no chargers for sale. But people were snatching them up. So, we bought a couple.

And ended up with a lot more than we bargained for.

When we charged them up in the newsroom, we found one of the $20 Blackberry phones contained more than 50 phone numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails from early September until a few days after election night.

We traced the Blackberry back to a staffer who worked for “Citizens for McCain,” a group of democrats who threw their support behind the Republican nominee. The emails contain an insider’s look at how grassroots operations work, full of scheduling questions and rallying cries for support.

Asked to comment on the matter, McCain campaign officials said this:

“They should have wiped that stuff out,” another said. But he added, “Given the way the campaign was run, this is not a surprise.”

I don’t think I could have possibly summed it up any better than that.

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McCain Campaign Sells Blackberry — Forgets To Wipe Memory

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