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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lurqer who wrote (39319)	3/11/2004 9:18:13 PM
From: lurqer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

U.S. Senate Panel Accord on Memo Probe Collapses A U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee effort to devise a bipartisan request for federal prosecutors to probe a scandal in which Republican staffers improperly accessed sensitive Democratic computer memos collapsed in bitter disarray on Thursday night. Democrats and some Republicans had wanted to refer the memo incident to the U.S. Justice Department, and several wanted a special prosecutor. 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 present, committee Chairman Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, announced on Thursday evening he was not going to take any further action on the memo probe and would leave it up to the Senate sergeant-at-arms to decide what to do next. The sergeant-at-arms, whose preliminary report into the documents was made public last week, told Reuters he needed to "digest what I just heard" before making a decision on whether to refer the matter to federal prosecutors. Earlier in the day, he said he thought a referral to the U.S. attorney's office was probably the right course of action. Democrats were caught by surprise, thinking they had a few more minutes to cast votes on the Senate floor before returning to the Judiciary session. "We weren't boycotting this -- we thought we had 10 more minutes," said Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, who said some Republicans wanted to stop or curtail the probe because they did not want any revelations about "which interest groups received these stolen documents" about the battle over the judges. Committee Democrats on Wednesday night had written their own letter to the Justice Department seeking a special prosecutor, but at a committee meeting on Thursday morning they agreed to back off that document and try to come up with a bipartisan or potentially even a unanimous alternate. Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle released a report last week showing how two Republican staffers, both of whom have since left the committee, improperly retrieved sensitive documents from Democratic committee staff computers. reuters.com lurqer