Republicans Raiding Computer Files

The blogosphere has been all over this story. With good reason. It's another milestone in the transformation of the party of Lincoln into the party of Ashcroft.

Infiltration of files seen as extensive Boston Globe 01/22/04

Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee [sic] 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.

The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November. ...

But the scope of both the intrusions and the likely disclosures is now known to have been far more extensive than the November incident, staffers and others familiar with the investigation say.

Manual Miranda from Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's staff, who is on administrative leave in the investigation, "argued that the only wrongdoing was on the part of the Democrats -- both for the content of their memos, and for their negligence in placing them where they could be seen."

At least he didn't call it a "third rate burglary," an infamous description of the Watergate burglary that resulted from a previous Republican administration's curiosity about the Democratic Party's files.