Memogate rears its ugly head....on the House side.

So it would appear that Memogate has happened before.

I am of course, referring to the Senate Judiciary Committee "Memogate" when Manuel Miranda, then a counsel to Senator Orrin Hatch, read memo traffic from Democrats on an open server. When he blew the whistle on several documented ethics (and possibly worse) violations, he was fired for his trouble.

This "Memogate" should not be confused with "Rathergate" when CBS's Dan Rather used forged documents to prove his forgone negative conclusion about President Bush's guard service during Vietnam. Or the "Memogate" when a Senate Intelligence Committee memo leaked out that documented the Democratic plan to politicize national security during the election year.

Nope. The "Memogate" I am referring to swirls around the documents first published on the Internet here.

It has happened before. Only it was Democrats reading Republican memos.

And no one got fired. No one was subpeonaed. No one was investigated unendingly. No one had to hire lawyers.

It was all quietly handled.

HERE is the document from 1996 from Rep. Gilman that painstakingly outlines what occurred and all the steps that were taken to resolve the situation. (If you cannot access the Gilman letter, drop me an email and I'll get it to ya.)

Got a few questions here.

It is close to inconceivable that House Republicans or Democrats did not tell anyone on Judiciary about this. What did (Hatch, Leahy, Kennedy, Pickle) know and when did they know it? Notice that Restrepo works with Melody Barnes, former Kennedy Chief Counsel, and co-author of the Elaine Jones memo. Getting the flow chart ready?

So let's review.

In 1996 a mirror image of Memogate occurred in the House Committee on International Relations (see Gilman link above).

There Republicans discovered that the staff of Ranking Member Lee Hamilton (D-OH.) had learned that they could “peruse” the automatically-saved back-up copies of all Committee staff documents. (Hamilton was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve as co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission and has often been considered by Democrats as a potential vice-president candidate due to his expertise in foreign policy.)

It was known by the entire Hamilton staff including his chief of staff. This went on for one year. Hamilton’s staff secured their own staff documents but chose to tell neither Republicans nor their own Democratic colleagues of the open access.

Not only did Hamilton staff “peruse” Republican documents, they shared them with the Clinton State Department, if not others.

As in Memogate, the access was negligently caused by the systems administrator, who worked in that case for the Republican chairman.

Ok, so what are the differences between the two Memogates?

Notably, Republicans appeared not to have had anything to hide.

The affair never became public.

Unlike Hatch and Pickle, Chairman Ben Gilman conducted a quiet but full forensic investigation.
The Gilman report recorded the name of one Hamilton staffer but suggested that many more had “perused” the back up files.

In his collegial letter to Hamilton, Gilman asked Hamilton how he thought that Democrat staff should be disciplined.

Hamilton’s response was to say that there should be no discipline and that he did not want to harm his staff’s careers.

Hamilton told Gilman that the access to documents on the shared network was the fault of Gilman’s systems administrator and that the Hamilton staff had violated no House ethics rule and no law.

The House investigation never became a circus and never resulted in a Bill of Attainder.
The named staffer was never harmed by public pillory. (Dan Restrep is now congressional director for John Podesta’s Center for American Progress.)

The matter never became public, until now.

This example answers Orrin Hatch’s seemingly disarming question to conservative leaders: “who would have done diffrerently.”

The House example addresses directly the concern of conservative leaders who reacted fairly negatively to Hatch during all of this. Would Democrats have done this to their staffs?