Hatch's handling of hacking decried

WASHINGTON — A chorus of conservative groups say Sen. Orrin Hatch's attempts to appease Democrats converted a "smoking gun" supposedly proving Democratic corruption of judicial confirmations into a bomb wounding only Republicans.

Criticism of the Utah Republican comes as Manuel Miranda, a top GOP aide overseeing judicial nominations, resigned Friday amid a probe into whether Republicans hacked into Senate computers to obtain and leak Democratic memos about judicial confirmations. Another unnamed aide, said to be a Utah native, quit earlier after telling probers he saw the files but did not leak them.

"They are definitely making them scapegoats, and hanging them out to dry," complained Jeff Mazella, executive director of the conservative Center for Individual Freedom, about Hatch and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.

"They hope that will just make the issue (of hacking) go away. But I don't know why they have never called for investigations into the content of those memos," he said. "They show how Democrats have corrupted the process. They prove special interests have full control over committee Democrats and are pulling their puppet strings."

At issue are Democratic memos leaked last year to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times. They showed, for example, that Democrats and liberal groups worked together to target Hispanic nominee Miguel Estrada specifically because they did not want Republicans to make political gains with Hispanics.

Another memo showed that staffers for Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., sought to delay confirmation of two nominees to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals specifically to ensure that court would still have a liberal majority when it heard a key Michigan affirmative action case.

When the leaks emerged, Kennedy and Dick Durbin, D-N.Y., howled that the only way such information could have gone to the press would be if someone had hacked into their Judiciary Committee computer files to get it. Hatch, chairman of the committee, at their request launched a probe into whether anyone on staff had done so.

Last November, Hatch announced he was "shocked and mortified" to find that at least one GOP committee staffer had improperly accessed the files and had been placed on administrative leave. That junior aide has never been identified, but others have said the aide was from Utah and has since quit.