Aide to Senate leader quits amid file probe
By Charlie Savage,Boston Globe Staff, 2/6/2004
WASHINGTON -- A top aide to Senate majority leader Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, said yesterday that he is resigning amid an investigation into GOP surveillance of private memos of Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Manuel Miranda, who advised Frist in the bitter partisan warfare over judicial nominees, confirmed yesterday that he intends to officially announce his resignation early next week. News of his intent was first reported yesterday by The Hill, a Washington-based newspaper that covers congressional affairs.
Miranda had been on leave pending the outcome of an investigation into how more than a dozen internal Democratic files detailing strategy for blocking certain nominees were obtained by The Wall Street Journal's editorial page in November. The memos showed the influence of outside interest groups, like the NAACP and People for the American Way, in Democratic decisions about which nominees to fight.
Democrats asked for an inquiry into how the private files had been obtained. Senate sergeant-at-arms William Pickle launched an investigation, and Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, announced that at least two Republican staff members, one of whom was later revealed to be Miranda, had been involved in an "improper, unethical, and simply unacceptable breach of confidential files."
As first reported by the Globe, the scope of the intrusions turned out to be much larger than a single incident. At least one GOP Judiciary Committee member, who has since left Washington, exploited a computer glitch that allowed him to access restricted Democratic files on a shared server without entering a password. This allowed Republicans to monitor Democratic correspondence for a year.
"What really happened here is this younger staffer downloaded maybe 1,000 documents or more," Miranda said. "I didn't know he had downloaded it, preserved it. My understanding is that he actually read only 5 percent of them. And I read only 10 percent of that 5 percent."
The Hill reported that Miranda was pressured to resign so that Democrats would let the matter drop.
Miranda said he chose to leave "so I am not a further distraction to the majority leader in the pursuit of his legislative agenda. But certainly, my departure will allow me to speak freely about the substance of the Democratic memos -- both the ones that are published and the ones yet to be published."
By Charlie Savage,Boston Globe Staff, 2/6/2004
WASHINGTON -- A top aide to Senate majority leader Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, said yesterday that he is resigning amid an investigation into GOP surveillance of private memos of Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Manuel Miranda, who advised Frist in the bitter partisan warfare over judicial nominees, confirmed yesterday that he intends to officially announce his resignation early next week. News of his intent was first reported yesterday by The Hill, a Washington-based newspaper that covers congressional affairs.
Miranda had been on leave pending the outcome of an investigation into how more than a dozen internal Democratic files detailing strategy for blocking certain nominees were obtained by The Wall Street Journal's editorial page in November. The memos showed the influence of outside interest groups, like the NAACP and People for the American Way, in Democratic decisions about which nominees to fight.
Democrats asked for an inquiry into how the private files had been obtained. Senate sergeant-at-arms William Pickle launched an investigation, and Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, announced that at least two Republican staff members, one of whom was later revealed to be Miranda, had been involved in an "improper, unethical, and simply unacceptable breach of confidential files."
As first reported by the Globe, the scope of the intrusions turned out to be much larger than a single incident. At least one GOP Judiciary Committee member, who has since left Washington, exploited a computer glitch that allowed him to access restricted Democratic files on a shared server without entering a password. This allowed Republicans to monitor Democratic correspondence for a year.
"What really happened here is this younger staffer downloaded maybe 1,000 documents or more," Miranda said. "I didn't know he had downloaded it, preserved it. My understanding is that he actually read only 5 percent of them. And I read only 10 percent of that 5 percent."
The Hill reported that Miranda was pressured to resign so that Democrats would let the matter drop.
Miranda said he chose to leave "so I am not a further distraction to the majority leader in the pursuit of his legislative agenda. But certainly, my departure will allow me to speak freely about the substance of the Democratic memos -- both the ones that are published and the ones yet to be published."
