| http://thehill.com/news/09142004/miranda.aspx
Manuel Miranda, who quit as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s (R-Tenn.) top aide in the memogate scandal, has sued Attorney General John Ashcroft to halt an investigation targeting Miranda.
In a complaint filed Friday with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Miranda also named Ralph Basham, the director of the U.S. Secret Service, as a defendant. The case has been assigned to Judge Gladys Kessler.
It is the latest twist in a controversy that has boiled and simmered since last year, when media outlets published information about 14 internal memos belonging to Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. The documents had been downloaded from a committee computer server and detailed Democratic strategy discussions about how to halt Bush’s judicial nominees to several appellate courts. | | pedro DE sa bandeira | | Senate Sergeant of Arms Bill Pickle |
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Miranda’s suit demands that the court “issue a preliminary and permanent injunction enjoining Defendants, their employees, agents, grand juries and all persons in active concert or participation with any of them from investigating, indicting or prosecuting the Plaintiff.”
It cites several sections of the law under which Senate Sergeant at Arms Bill Pickle suggested Miranda could be prosecuted, and laid out arguments for why they did not apply to Miranda’s actions while a Frist aide.
“My motivation was to bring this to an end and to do the right thing because what was done to was so wrong,” Miranda said. “I was moved by the fact that what happened was an abuse of power so unfair it shouldn’t happen to anyone.”
Miranda’s suit claims that members of the Judiciary Committee used their influence and official Senate resources to imply his guilt in the memo controversy. It also accuses Pickle of influencing Frist to fire him.
The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York is investigating Miranda for possible violations of the law, which Pickle enumerated in a report earlier this year as hacking, stealing government property and making false statements to federal investigators.
A person familiar with the case said that members of the media have already been subpoenaed by the attorney’s office.
The case was referred by the Justice Department to the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York in April after Senate Democrats demanded an independent probe, citing Ashcroft’s former service on the judiciary panel while a member of the Senate.
That month, the Justice Department informed Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, that the case had been assigned to David Kelly, one of New York’s leading federal prosecutors.
In March, three Democrats and three Republicans on the committee signed a letter requesting the appointment of a “professional prosecutor who is free from all conflicts and appearances of conflict” to probe whether Miranda and Senate aides violated the law by accessing about 4,600 internal Democratic documents from the Judiciary server.
Miranda’s lawyers argue that their client did not violate the federal law against computer hacking because the Democratic documents were “unprotected documents [and] were not ‘confidential,’ nor legally or constitutionally protected.”
The Senate sergeant at arms’ report found that neither Miranda nor any other GOP aide broke computer code to access the Democratic documents, which were not protected with security restrictions from being read by any aide or lawmaker with access to the computer server.
Miranda’s lawyers argue that their client did not steal or embezzle government property because the documents were read and not removed in a fashion that would have prevented Democratic lawmakers and aides from making use of them.
Senate observers familiar with the allegations against Miranda say that Kelly’s strongest case may be to pursue a conviction for violating 18 USC Section 1001, which governs “false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement[s]” made to federal investigators.
Pickle’s March report stated that Jason Lundell, formerly a nominations clerk on the Republican staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee, testified that Miranda had given copies of the Democratic memos to Sean Rushton, executive director of the Committee for Justice.
But the report also stated that Miranda had denied to investigators giving the documents to Rushton or indicating to Lundell that he did so.
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