Kennedy/Leahy/Durbin/Schumer Demand White House disclose its contact with Boyden Gray & Kay Daly

As Senate investigators put the final touches on a report on the handling of leaked memos, Judiciary Democrats took their grievances to the White House, demanding to know if Bush administration officials had access to the controversial documents.

In a letter to White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, four senior Democrats on the Judiciary Committee formally asked the White House whether administration officials had any knowledge of or access to the thousands of memos that were taken from Democrats over a roughly 18-month period from 2001 to early 2003. The Democrats — Sens. Patrick Leahy (Vt.), Edward Kennedy (Mass.), Dick Durbin (Ill.) and Charles Schumer (N.Y.) — also pointedly asked whether Gonzales or his staff had received the memos or been shown the memos by members of two conservative interest groups that have been connected to the case.

“It appears that those involved in this surveillance and theft passed along information derived from their activities to partisan activists and to hand-picked columnists and media organizations,” the Senators wrote in a letter dated Feb. 25. “Questions arise as to whether anyone at the White House was involved or aware of these activities.”

The letter was the latest example of how Judiciary Democrats intend to keep the mushrooming memo scandal going, whatever the outcome of the internal investigation into the matter by Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Bill Pickle, who is expected to brief Leahy and Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) this afternoon on his final report.

Schumer, in an interview last week, contended there was “near unanimity” on the Democratic side of the panel that the Pickle probe will not be sufficient and that the matter should be forwarded to the Justice Department or another federal law enforcement entity. Schumer, Durbin and other Democrats believe that, since Pickle’s investigators have met with little success in interviewing representatives of outside conservative interest groups, only a federal investigator with subpoena power would be able to complete the investigation.

A handful of investigators, including some of the Secret Service agents who were detailed to Pickle’s office for the investigation, met Thursday with a figure at the center of the investigation, Manuel Miranda, a former Judiciary Committee staffer who worked for Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) last year on nominations.

Miranda resigned from Frist’s office earlier this month after admitting that he had read a fraction of the thousands of memos that another staffer had downloaded off a jointly shared server. He said the documents were not illegally stolen and that there was no “hacking” to access the memos.

His 90-minute meeting with Pickle’s agents Thursday was his third interview since the case began in mid-November. Miranda was accompanied by his two lawyers, who are handling his case pro bono.

In an interview, Miranda said the agents told him they had determined that he was not part of any computer hacking, but continued to focus their questions to him on his relationship to outside groups such as the Committee for Justice and the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary.

At one point the questioning centered on a Nov. 14 editorial in the Wall Street Journal, which began the controversy by excerpting comments from about 14 memos penned by Democratic staff and outlining meetings and contacts with liberal interest groups. “They asked me if I had written the Wall Street Journal editorial,” Miranda said. “I said, ‘This isn’t the Georgetown Voice, this is the Wall Street Journal.’”

In their attempts to trace how the memos went from the committee’s computers to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and Web sites such as the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary’s, the investigators have focused on Miranda, whose role in Frist’s office was partly as a liaison to interest groups on the right.

Early last month Pickle’s investigators asked the Wall Street Journal about their contacts with Miranda. They’ve also spoken to employees of the Committee for Justice and Coalition for a Fair Judiciary.

The investigators have generally been rebuffed in their efforts to talk to outside groups.

The Judiciary Democrats, in their letter to Gonzales, picked up on the belief that Miranda or another GOP aide took the stolen memos and gave them to one of the groups, which then relayed them to the Journal’s editorial page and the Washington Times, two outlets generally considered by conservatives to be more favorable to them in their coverage.

Their letter to Gonzales specifically asked for the White House to detail every instance in which it communicated with C. Boyden Gray and Sean Rushton, the chairman and executive director of the Committee for Justice, respectively, and Kay Daly, the founder of the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary.

Democrats have long believed that this scandal could explode if they were allowed to follow the path of the memos and place them inside the White House. When any of President Bush’s judicial nominees prepares for a hearing before the Judiciary Committee, aides from three entities prepare the nominee: Republican aides from Judiciary, Justice Department officials and staff in the White House counsel’s office.

“Did you or anyone who has served in your office or at the White House receive from Manuel Miranda or any other Senate employee or employees any of the computer files of Democratic Senators or their staffs or information derived from those files?” the Senators asked.

If all goes as planned, Hatch and Leahy expect to meet this afternoon with Pickle or one of his investigators to review the report. It’s unclear how much of the report they will release to the public, but other committee members — from liberals such as Durbin and Schumer to conservatives such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) — are demanding that Hatch and Leahy include them in the process of deciding what to do next with the report.

Hatch said late last week he wasn’t sure what steps they would take, but continued to maintain that no “reasonable prosecutor” would likely pursue a case against Miranda.

“We’ll meet, and Leahy and I will discuss it. We’ll see where we go from there,” Hatch said.

Abner, you nailed it.....briar patch, it is.
From "The Hill"

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.

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