Hacking Incident Riles Democrats

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday released Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle's three-month investigation into the accessing of Democratic staff files.

Democrats on the panel immediately called for an outside investigation into what they call the unprecedented theft of one party's internal documents by another party on Capitol Hill.

"If you take things that do not belong to you, that is wrong, and there is no way to whitewash that," said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.

Pickle's report, based on interviews with more than 160 staffers and others, says Manuel Miranda, who was a lawyer on the staff of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and Jason Lundell, a clerk working on judicial nominations on Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Orrin G. Hatch's staff, pilfered the memos by entering the computer files of Democratic staff members.

According to the report, more than 4,000 documents were copied beginning in 2001, when both men worked for Hatch (R-Utah), and continued for 18 months.

The report says a computer server shared by the committee's Democratic and Republican staffers was set up in such a way that "a majority of the files and folders

The investigation did not find that the downloaded files had been given to any other staff members or to any senators. The report leaves unanswered the question some Democrats have raised of whether the information was passed to judicial nominees, the White House or the Justice Department to prepare for hearings before the committee.

But Hatch said Thursday that he had been assured by the White House that no one there saw or used the memos.

The report says Lundell, who has since left Hatch's staff to attend graduate school, told investigators he learned how to access the computer files of Democratic staffers by watching a systems administrator perform maintenance work.

Lundell told investigators he first printed 100 to 200 documents in the fall of 2001 that pertained to the nomination of Judge Charles W. Pickering Sr. and gave them to a supervisor. He said that two days later, the supervisor and another staff member told him not to use the documents and shredded them.