9 Dems and 3 Republicans call for Prosecutor

[mburbank]

Senate panel seeks prosecutor for memo scandal

Thursday, March 11, 2004 Posted: 10:27 PM EST (0327 GMT)


WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- A Senate Judiciary Committee bipartisan bid for a federal probe into Republican staffers' improper access to sensitive Democratic computer files collapsed in bitter disarray Thursday night, leaving the future of the investigation in question.

A majority of the panel -- all nine Democrats and at least three Republicans -- had wanted to ask the Justice Department to appoint a prosecutor or even a special prosecutor to look into what the panel's senior Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont called "unprecedented partisan espionage."

Committee members attempted all day to find compromise language on how to proceed. The documents had involved President Bush's contentious judicial appointees.

With no Democrats and about a half-dozen Republicans present, committee chairman Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, announced Thursday evening the panel would not be able to reach agreement and he would leave it up to the Senate sergeant-at-arms William Pickle to decide what to do.

"We cannot get together," Hatch said. Addressing Pickle, he said, "Do whatever you think is right."

Pickle told Reuters he needed to "digest what I just heard" before making a decision. Earlier in the day, he said he thought a referral to the U.S. attorney's office, though not the Justice Department itself, was probably the best course of action.

Pickle last week released a report detailing how two Republican staffers, who have both since left their jobs, exploited computer security weaknesses to access more than 4,600 documents. Republicans and Democrats alike have condemned the staffers' actions as improper, but they say prosecutors must decide whether actual crimes were committed.
Democrats surprised

Democrats were caught by surprise by Hatch's action, thinking they had a few more minutes to cast votes on the Senate floor before returning to the Judiciary session in a nearby room, the fourth meeting of the day on this topic.

"We weren't boycotting this," said Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, who accused some Republicans of wanting to stop or curtail the probe to block revelations about "which interest groups received these stolen documents" about Democratic strategy in the fierce partisan battle over the judges.

Some of the memos were leaked to conservative media outlets. Democrats wanted to know whether the documents, or materials based on the documents, were given to the White House or shared with Bush's judicial nominees.

Committee Democrats Wednesday night had written their own letter to the Justice Department seeking a special prosecutor.

After the committee blowup Thursday night, six senators signed a similar though more softly worded request. They were Democrats Durbin, Charles Schumer of New York and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Republicans Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, Mike DeWine of Ohio, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

Lawyers representing one of the former aides who took the documents, Manuel Miranda, released two lengthy documents criticizing Pickle's report. They said Miranda was a whistle-blower, not a thief, taking advantage of a computer security glitch to fulfill his duty to further the president's agenda on the judiciary.

Also Thursday, the panel sent two more of the president's circuit court nominees to the full Senate for confirmation.

Democrats voted no or abstained on William Haynes, currently general counsel for the Defense Department, saying they wanted him to answer questions about the Defense Department's policies regarding the detention of enemy combatants at Guantanamo naval base in Cuba, and the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens declared "enemy combatants."