Memogate Prequel
The right way to handle a pseudo-scandal.
Tuesday, January 25, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
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.
If all this sounds familiar, the way Messrs. Gilman and Hamilton decided to deal with the matter is not. After a quiet internal investigation, they concluded that no House rules had been broken, fixed the computer system and told the Democratic staffers to stop snooping. Daniel Restrepo, the staffer cited in the letter as having leaked the documents to Mr. Talbot, never found himself in the public pillory. He was allowed to stay on the job until he left for law school some months later.
In short, Messrs. Gilman and Hamilton took the political and moral high road--in part, to be sure, to save themselves the public embarrassment of airing their committee's dirty laundry but also because standing by their staff was the right thing to do. As someone who was there tells us, the Congressmen didn't want to "ruin" anyone's career. It's too bad Senators Frist and Hatch had no such compunctions. And eight years later, when Memogate was in the headlines, it's too bad Messrs. Gilman and Hamilton didn't come forward with the story of their own experience with computer snooping on Capitol Hill.
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