Outrage over computer snooping overtook partisanship on the Senate Judiciary Committee Feb. 12, when several committee Republicans joined committee Democrats in backing a probe into breaking into Democratic computer files by Republican committee staffers.
"Conservatives who offer justification for this based on politics have missed the boat," Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-South Carolina.) told The Washington Post. "As a conservative, it runs against my philosophy of what the law is all about."
"(W)herever it goes… let the chips fall where there may," agreed Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Arizona). "No Senator can permit unethical behavior."
The probe is aimed at allegations that a pair of Republican committee staffers "exploited a computer flaw to access thousands of Democratic strategy memos and leaked their contents to sympathetic publications," the Post said, adding both staffers have since quit their jobs. The snooping is said to have been done from 2001 to 2003.
The memos raise questions as to whether promises of campaign cash and support were used to influence the Senate's advise-and-consent role in Presidential judicial nominations at the time of the 2002 midterm elections.
Manuel Miranda, a former counsel to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, has already told the Senate Ethics Committee that he had read "documents obtained from a once-shared section of the Senate Judiciary Committee computer network" that included evidence of that kind of influencing, the NCPPR said in a Feb. 11 statement.
The Republican committeemen who joined in supporting the probe broke ranks with conservative activists, the Post said. And the committee's leadership isn't exactly complaining, with Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), the ranking Democrat on the committee, saying it's premature to decide an actual crime was committed but it was clear that at least unethical conduct occurred. Cornyn even suggested a further investigation by law enforcement, the Post said.
Hatch has been under some fire from conservative activists for his role in launching the probe, though he told reporters his own computer files had been accessed without suggesting who was responsible for that. Some conservative groups have insisted the probe should go no further than focusing on the contents of the Democratic memos that were accessed, the Post said, because they prove "Democratic collusion with liberal interest groups" on President Bush's judicial nominations, rather than "dwelling" on Republican staff members who got into the files.
On the other hand, some Democrats compared it to Watergate, notably Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Massachussetts), whose tenure in the Senate goes back to before that 1972-74 scandal. "In those days," he told reporters, "break-ins required physical presence, burglar's tools, lookouts, and getaway cars. Today, theft may only require a computer and the skills to use it. A break-in is still a break-in."
A day before those statements, the National Center for Public Policy Research, a think tank describing itself as a conservative/free-market group, called for a full investigation into the entire matter, but pressed the point that the core issue was the influence buying involving judicial nominations.
Calling Miranda a whistleblower, NCPPR president Amy Ridenour said whistleblowers weren't appreciated in the Senate, which was "why even powerful Republican Senators have acted against a staffer who exposed possible wrongdoing by Democrats."
American Criminal Justice Center David Almasi agreed. "We've investigated to death how these scandalous memos were leaked, but we've ignored their shocking content," he said in his own statement. If the allegations are true, a heinous crime has been committed against our constitutional form of government. It is our duty to get to the bottom of these serious charges."
