The Senate sergeant-at-arms has opened an investigation into Republicans obtaining and publicizing internal memos from the computer and network resources of two Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Late Tuesday, Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) confirmed that his inquiry had found that a member of his staff "had improperly accessed some of the documents" and a second former staff member "may also have been involved."
Hatch said the current staff member, who was not named publicly and has been put on administrative leave, denied releasing to the media the strategy memos written for Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.). Excerpts of the memos were first published Nov. 14 by the Wall Street Journal and the next day in the Washington Times.
The 15 memos written from 2001 to 2003 promote strategies for opposing judicial nominees of President Bush and occasionally report the views of outside organizations that have made suggestions on how to respond. Since the first disclosure, House and Senate Republicans, along with conservative groups, have continued to publicize the memos, using them to criticize the Democrats for their tactics.
On Nov. 17, the Independent Women's Forum, a conservative advocacy group, issued a press release in which it said the memos show the "immense power they [special interest groups] exert over Democratic legislators." The press release goes on to identify Manuel Miranda, a senior aide to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), as circulating the memos .
"Manuel Miranda, counsel in Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's office, recently sent around an e-mail composed of strategy memos that had been obtained from the 2001-2002 period when Democrats ran the Judiciary Committee," the Women's Forum release said. "The 'real bosses' of Democratic legislators, Miranda concluded, are the liberal interest groups that more or less tell the senators when to sit, speak and roll over -- and which Bush judges to confirm or not."
Miranda, who worked for the Judiciary panel's Republican staff until joining Frist in February, said in an interview Wednesday that he had sent the Women's Forum and other groups an e-mail copy of the Wall Street Journal article but nothing more. Asked about the Democratic strategy memos, he said they "have never touched my office. . . . I have never distributed any memos to anyone."
Rieva Holycross, the Women's Forum official who said she was responsible for the Nov. 17 press release, described it as "a terrible mistake." The group never received the memos, she said, and only had the Wall Street Journal article that Miranda had sent. Holycross said the quote attributed to Miranda in the press release was a rewrite of a sentence in the Journal article, something that Miranda had also suggested.
Miranda refused to say whether he had been questioned by the sergeant-at-arms investigators. "I can't comment on an ongoing investigation," he said. When asked whether any of Hatch's investigators had talked to him, he said he had "not met with them at all."
Frist spokeswoman Amy Call said the office was cooperating with the investigation but would have no further comment.
Five committee Republicans have objected to Sergeant-at-Arms William H. Pickle allowing anyone to read their backup tapes without their consent. They also want the inquiry to be limited to examining the "memoranda in question and no other files."
Three days after the Wall Street Journal article appeared, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee along with Kennedy and Durbin, requested that Pickle hire security experts to determine who retrieved the documents.
They also asked for an audit of logs to determine who may have been trying to access the files or directories from which the memos had been copied. Two days later, the senators complained to Hatch that he had not yet given consent for the committee hard drives to be turned over to Pickle.
On Wednesday, Leahy issued a statement saying he believed Pickle's investigation "is being handled in good faith" and "with the intent of identifying and solving this problem."
That same day, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), a Judiciary Committee member who asked Pickle to get his permission before accessing his computer files, took the Senate floor to discuss the memos.
After saying he awaited the outcome of the investigation to see how the memos were obtained, he said that now they have "entered into the public domain, and I think it is important that we address these memos and what, in fact, they confirm about the obstruction and destructive politics that have taken hold of the judicial confirmation process and which have left me concerned that there is no foreseeable end to the current gridlock."
