'Most of Bush's nominees are Nazis' — those memos Patrick Leahy griped about were damning to the Democrats
by Timothy P. Carney
| September 05, 2018 02:55 PM
When given the chance to question Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Judiciary Committee Democrat Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., dedicated most of his time to griping about a 2001-2003 incident in which Leahy's emails were stolen. It was a bizarre line of questioning that recalled an ugly incident, which Leahy probably shouldn't want to revisit.
Here's what happened: After Sen. Jim Jeffords switched from Republican to Democrat in 2001, he flipped the Senate in the process. When Democrats took over the Judiciary Committee, they failed to build a firewall between the Democratic part of the committee server and the Republican part. A young Republican IT staffer figured this out, and a senior staffer named Manny Miranda exploited that oversight to go and get Democratic documents.
This wasn't quite hacking, but it was unethical snooping — equivalent to opening an unlocked file cabinet and looking at files in a colleague's office. I was involved in this fracas and even got a call from law enforcement about it, because Miranda had fed one of these stolen memos to me, without telling me the source.
Brett Kavanaugh wasn't involved in this breach. Leahy presented no evidence that Kavanaugh knew about this breach. So it's hard to imagine its relevance to Kavanaugh's fitness for the Supreme Court. The old story does, however, shed light on how Democrats handle Republican judicial nominees.
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/most-of-bushs-nominees-are-nazis-those-memos-patrick-leahy-griped-about-were-damning-to-the-democrats
