Posted on 01/25/2005 3:40:57 AM PST by Elkiejg
Regular readers of these pages will recall our scoop a little over a year ago on what came to be known on Capitol Hill as Memogate. Our publication of Democratic strategy memos on how to defeat President Bush's judicial nominees created a stir in Washington, not least because they showed how Senators Ted Kennedy, Dick Durbin and others were taking orders from liberal interest groups, even to the point of delaying a vote on a candidate for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals until it had heard the University of Michigan affirmative action case.
More than a year later, it's not over yet. Federal prosecutor David Kelley is conducting an investigation into the "stolen" memos, which were obtained by Republican staffers courtesy of a glitch in the Judiciary Committee's computer system. Manuel Miranda, staffer to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and former staffer to the Republican Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch, was forced to resign.
Meanwhile, a memo of a different ilk has just come to light that puts Memogate into some long-needed perspective. It's a 1996 letter from Republican Representative Ben Gilman, then-chairman of the House International Relations Committee, to his Democratic counterpart, Lee Hamilton. (See the full text here.)
The letter describes how Democratic staffers, taking advantage of a glitch in the committee's computer system, had been reading the private documents of the Republican staff for more than a year. Oh--did we mention that they were funneling them to the Clinton State Department? Their antics were revealed when Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot called Chairman Gilman to protest drafts of two memos on Haiti that hadn't even reached Mr. Gilman's desk yet.
snip.....
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
What weak-kneed lizards our Republican senators are! None of them has the moxie to be leaders. If you want to be a Tom DeLay, you have to put up with daily attacks from the libs in the media and on Capitol Hill. The Republican senators want the media to like them, and the party props up these wusses in the primaries, ala Specter/Toomey. With treatment like that, Conservatives may some day have to leave the Republican Party, which would again make it the compliant Dem doormat it was for the 40 years pre-Reagan.
*bump*
You might want to save some of that anger for the dems. Are you with us or against us?
I'll second that.
I wonder why Toon's State Department wanted that info. And what they were doing with it.
Ping aling.
I don't want to register to read the whole article right now but how did the 1996 business "come to light" and is it possible that it came from this investigation as a mitigating factor for Miranda?
I see from a quick Google that Kelley was appointed to this investigation back in April. Maybe there's another angle this is being looked into.
I can't watch a single day of television without seeing the Viagra and Levitra commercials. Why don't Frist and Hatch get a prescription?
Cyn -- I'm going to have Manny Miranda on my show today on Rightalk at 1 PM. www.rightalk.com
That's a different Memogate. That's the memogate from the Senate Intelligence Committee. The one that the WSJ is talking about is from the Senate Judiciary Committee. The memos are on my website at www.fairjudiciary.com -- click on "Collusion Memos".
I'm just seeing your note. Was it 1:00 pm eastern? If so, I missed it. Could you let us know what he said?
Thanks!
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