MENSA candidates / Capitol Hill In my dictionary, this is the definition for oxymoron.
Posted on 03/01/2004 6:00:17 PM PST by Indy Pendance
The Senate sergeant at arms’ final report on whether Republican aides hacked into Democratic Judiciary Committee files has been delayed as a former committee aide stepped forward with new information that seems to undercut Democratic claims that a criminal investigation was warranted.
The report was scheduled to be given to Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and ranking Democrat Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) yesterday.
Democrats on the judiciary panel have called for a criminal investigation of how Republican aides accessed internal Democratic documents and whether they then circulated them to the media, the Department of Justice and the White House.
But a former aide assigned to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) on Friday signed a sworn affadavit stating that between October 2001 and September 2002, Republican and Democratic staffers on the Judiciary Committee could easily access each other’s private documents on the committee’s shared computer server.
The aide’s testimony seems to corroborate the defense put forth by Manuel Miranda, who coordinated the GOP strategy on President Bush’s judicial nominees for Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) before being pressured to resign last month.
For weeks, Miranda has asserted that he and another GOP aide embroiled in the controversy over publicized Democratic memos could easily access the documents from the desktop computers and did not break or hack into Democratic files.
The aide, whose affidavit was drafted with the help of Miranda’s legal counsel, served as an unpaid intern with the Judiciary Committee for 11 months, ending in September 2002. During that time, thousands of internal Democratic Judiciary Committee documents were downloaded by GOP staff, and 14 of those documents were later leaked to journalists.
Prior to working for Grassley, the aide was a computer technician at the University of Maryland and helped manage computer security for the school’s technical support administration.
The aide, who spoke to The Hill on the condition of anonymity, said he has not yet spoken with investigators working for Sergeant at Arms Bill Pickle.
“In little time, it became apparent to me that security protocols for the use of the Judiciary shared network were inconsistently applied and so far as I was aware, largely unsupervised,” the aide wrote in the affidavit.
“In little time, I became aware that by clicking onto the icon ‘My Network Places’ followed, as I recall, by the icon ‘Network Connections,’ one could, intentionally or unintentionally, enter a panel that contained folders belonging to Judiciary staff, from what I could tell, of both Republicans and Democrats. I made this discovery quite easily while searching for the shared network for constituent letter models.”
The aide went on to state that any member of the Judicary Committee could intentionally or unintentionally open folders containing files that were clearly not password protected.
The aide said that Republican and Democratic files on the Judiciary Committee’s shared drive could be accessed by staff on the committee unless those files were given a password. However, several committee aides had failed to take that step.
“It was sort of like leaving a memo face up on your desk and leaving for the weekend,” said the former Grassley aide.
The aide said he was introduced socially to one of Miranda’s lawyers and soon realized he had personal experience that could benefit Miranda’s defense.
The aide’s affidavit also stated that he informed other Grassley staffers and the U.S. Secret Service of the gaps in computer security but that neither took any actions to protect the vulnerable files.
“Today’s news will regrettably leave some senators with egg on their face,” Miranda said in a statement released yesterday.
Miranda said the affidavit corroborated his assertions that the Democratic documents were available to Republicans because of the negligence of Democratic technology staff, not GOP hacking.
Miranda also called on the Senate to make the entire report public. He learned in a meeting with investigators last week that Republican and Democratic lawmakers wanted to redact significant portions of the report, presumably to protect other staff members.
In recent days, the Sergeant at Arms’ investigation has focused on the Bush administration and whether the White House obtained the internal Democratic documents from GOP aides on the Hill to prepare for the defense of the president’s controversial nominees, according to sources familiar with the investigation.
The probe’s latest turn seems to reflect concerns voiced by Senate Democrats over the administration’s level of involvement in what some Democrats now refer to as “Memogate.”
Also yesterday, four Democratic senators — Leahy, Edward Kennedy (Mass.), Dick Durbin (Ill.) and Charles Schumer (N.Y.) — released a letter sent Friday to Attorney General John Ashcroft demanding to know whether the Justice Department was aware that GOP staffers had accessed Democratic files or were privy to information contained in those files.
Democrats sent a similar letter Wednesday to White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez.
By the way, welcome to FR.
MENSA candidates / Capitol Hill In my dictionary, this is the definition for oxymoron.
What he says is quite probably true -- it's just the circumstances that raise flags for me. The real story is probably that he was afraid he'd get hounded out of a job in the same way Mr. Miranda did.
What would be really funny, would be if they could find evidence that Democrat staffers had gotten into the Republican documents in the same way.....
The Republicans have the goods on the Democrats, and they should be hitting backI couldn't agree more. If the documents truly have been leaked already, release them all! When the Dims in the California state house left that microphone on, letting the Republican minority know they intended to push the budget even further out of whack in order to get a tax increase, the Republicans had the good sense to release the information to the press. That helped to bring down Gray Davis, and will probably help reelect George Bush.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.