ComputerGate: Senate Judiciary Committee
Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.
From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.
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The revelation comes as the battle of judicial nominees is reaching a new level of intensity. Last week, President Bush used his recess power to appoint Judge Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, bypassing a Democratic filibuster that blocked a vote on his nomination for a year because of concerns over his civil rights record.
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As the extent to which Democratic communications were monitored came into sharper focus, Republicans yesterday offered a new defense. They said that in the summer of 2002, their computer technician informed his Democratic counterpart of the glitch, but Democrats did nothing to fix the problem.
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The emerging scope of the GOP surveillance of confidential Democratic files represents a major escalation in partisan warfare over judicial appointments. The bitter fight traces back to 1987, when Democrats torpedoed Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court. In the 1990s, Republicans blocked many of President Clinton's nominees. Since President Bush took office, those roles have been reversed.
Against that backdrop, both sides have something to gain and lose from the investigation into the computer files. For Democrats, the scandal highlights GOP dirty tricks that could result in ethics complaints to the Senate and the Washington Bar -- or even criminal charges under computer intrusion laws.
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But for Republicans, the scandal also keeps attention on the memo contents, which demonstrate the influence of liberal interest groups in choosing which nominees Democratic senators would filibuster. Other revelations from the memos include Democrats' race-based characterization of Estrada as "especially dangerous, because . . . he is Latino," which they feared would make him difficult to block from a later promotion to the Supreme Court.
And, at the request of the NAACP, the Democrats delayed any hearings for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals until after it heard a landmark affirmative action case -- though a memo noted that staffers "are a little concerned about the propriety of scheduling hearings based on the resolution of a particular case."
Get the whole article from the Boston Globe.
Matt's Chat
While there are elements of this story that disturb me (the Republicans don't need insider information to combat the insanity of the liberals, they really don't.), and I certainly don't condone such actions, the issue for me is the CONTENT of those memos. They reveal exactly what we've all known: that the Democrats are beholden to special interests and have an agenda that doesn't have the best interests of minorities in mind.
Mark's Remarks
I agree. I find the idea of monitoring the libs communications disturbing, and add to that the air of impropriety, it is not good. However, the content of these memos, that is where the real story is. Democrats are all about themselves and protecting THEIR relationships with special interests while keeping a plantation mentality toward their minoritiy followers of, maybe we will give you big offices someday, but not now. The reality is far different. The libs in the Senate are all about staying in power, and about making this president look bad. Sadly, they have had limited success, but they have failed most of the time. These Dims are truly scumbags, in my opinion, for not operating on the merits of the candidate but simply because of who taps them and what their lobbyist buddies say. Truly sad, all around.
