A Georgetown University graduate is at the center of a Capitol Hill investigation into the viewing and leaking of internal memos written by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Manuel Miranda (SFS ’82), Chief Judicial Counsel to Senate ajority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), has been identified as one of the Republican staffers who may have taken advantage of a computer system glitch to access private communication between ranking Democrats for more than a year.

Excerpts from the memos, which discussed meetings with interest groups and strategies for fighting President George W. Bush’s judicial nominations, were published in The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times in November 2003.

Miranda has denied distributing memos to the press and is currently on leave from Frist’s office.

According to The Boston Globe, GOP staff members viewed hundreds of memos, talking points and accounts of private meetings without the knowledge of the Democratic authors between the spring of 2002 and at least April 2003.

The information was supposed to be protected by a password, but a computer technician working on the shared server shortly after the Democratic takeover of the Senate in 2001 apparently failed to set up the proper protection.

The Boston Globe, which broke the story, and subsequent newspapers, named Miranda as the only staff member involved in the documents’ viewing.

Democrats suggested that his involvement based partly on the appearance of his name on the electronic taglines of two out of 14 memos that were posted on a conservative Web site.

Miranda was also named in a Nov. 17 press release issued by the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative advocacy group, which decried “the immense power [special interest groups] exert over Democratic legislators,” a claim backed by memos they said were distributed by Miranda.

Miranda later denied circulating memos to anyone, and the IWF retracted its statement, saying the Frist staffer had only sent them a newspaper article about the memos’ contents. Three days earlier, The Wall Street Journal ran a story that quoted extensively from the leaked memos, and The Washington Times followed suit with a similar article a day later.

The matter is being investigated by the office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle, who has called in investigators from General Dynamics and the U.S. Secret Service. So far, his office has interviewed more than 100 people and seized over a half dozen computers, including four Judiciary servers and one server from the office of Sen. Frist. The investigation, which began last November, is expected to conclude next month.

The leaked memos are especially sensitive because they contain inside information about Democrats’ plans to derail some of the Bush judicial appointees the senators viewed as objectionable – already a sore spot among Senate Republicans.

The memos, many of which are between Judiciary Committee members Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), reveal plans to filibuster certain nominees and appear to demonstrate the influence of liberal groups such as People for the American War, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League and the NAACP.

Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) told the Associated Press that he was “mortified that this improper, unethical and simply unacceptable breach of confidential files may have occurred on my watch.”

The senator acknowledged that the second staff member known to have accessed the files was one of his own aides, who has since been placed on administrative leave. Miranda previously worked for Hatch as an aide on the Judiciary Committee.

“Those documents that I did read were, in my view, not obtained in any way that was improper, unlawful or unethical,” Miranda told The New York Times on Jan. 22. He described them as “inadvertent disclosures that came to me as a result of some negligence on the part of the Democrats’ technology staff.”

Miranda was unable to be reached for comment.

Miranda told The Boston Globe in a Jan. 22 article that he was on “paternity leave,” and the Congressional newspaper, Roll Call, quoted a Republican aide on Jan. 20 as saying that iranda’s leave was not related to the ongoing investigation, and that he was expected back in the office in a few weeks.

Nick Smith, a spokesman in Sen. Frist’s press office, would only confirm that Miranda is “on leave pending the results of the investigation,” and refused to speculate about iranda’s status after that.

“We have no comment until the investigation is over,” he said.

Miranda had also told The New York Times that he had informed the Democrats’ offices about the glitch – some Republicans have claimed the Democrats were made aware as early as the summer of 2002 – but that the Democrats did nothing to fix the problem. The Boston Globe states that “other staffers” maintain the Democrats were not informed until November 2003, the same month the memos were published in the press.

Senate Democrats have expressed outrage over what they view as a violation of privacy and of Senate ethics rules. In a Dec. 15, 2003 letter to The Wall Street Journal, Sen. Durbin wrote, “The notion that the Democrats invited this illegal electronic theft is as weak as arguing that a homeowner invites burglary because he has windows that allow prospective crooks to see the valuables inside. The shared computer system was designed under Republican control of the Senate so that senators and their staffs have access only to their own files.”

If these files are determined by the investigation to be official business, any individual found to have gained unauthorized access to the documents could face a sanction under Senate non-disclosure rules, or up to a year in prison.

Miranda has been an outspoken alumnus, challenging the university to return to its more conservative, Catholic roots, as legal counsel to the Georgetown Ignatian Society and as former national president of the Cardinal Newman Society, among other positions.