Pacific Views

Smells like Watergate.

Last November, there was a story about how someone in the office of US Senate Judiciary Committee chair Orrin Hatch was involved in stealing data from the computers of Democratic committee members. Hatch revealed this fact after senators Dick Durbin and Edward Kennedy complained about the theft of confidential memos from their servers. These memos discussed Democratic tactics for blocking Senate confirmation of Dubya's worst judicial nominations. Somehow these memos wound up in the hands of journalists at the conservative Wall Street Journal and Washington Times.

Today, the Boston Globe is reporting that the break-in at the Judiciary Committee was far bigger than first believed. According to the Globe, Republicans were reading Democratic strategy messages and other files for over a year, and then passing the interesting messages on to friendly journalists.

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.

With the help of forensic computer experts from General Dynamics and the US Secret Service, his office has interviewed about 120 people to date and seized more than half a dozen computers -- including four Judiciary servers, one server from the office of Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and several desktop hard drives.

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.

The rest of the story makes the Republicans look even worse. Make sure to go by the Globe and read it.