More on Fox "News" and its Party

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In light of the new memos out about Fox News helping to orchestrate the Republicans' deceptive PR campaign on the health care bill that that Wendell Potter wrote about this week, the Center for Media and Democracy is reprinting and updating an excerpt from one of my personal encounters with Fox News' efforts to stage-manage political theatre. The piece below also includes material from documented sources compiled in SourceWatch.

Fox News Coordination with the Senate Leadership on the Official Business of the U.S. Senate

I served as Senator Patrick Leahy's Chief Nominations Counsel for most of President George W. Bush's first term, when Democrats were united in blocking the most extreme nominees for lifetime appointments to the federal courts. During those battles to protect people from having unfair judges appointed to make decisions about people's rights and claims, we were routinely assailed by the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Fox News "stories." Both pulled out all stops to help the Republicans pack the courts with pro-corporate/anti-individual rights judges. During my tenure, we permanently stopped some of the worst candidates (like the Pentagon's General Counsel, William Haynes, the cross-burning sympathizer, Charles Pickering Sr., and a right-wing ideologue being groomed to be the first Latino on the Supreme Court, Miguel Estrada). Others we fought slipped through, over my and others' strong objections -- like John Roberts, who is now the Chief Justice and the behind-the-scenes architect of the Citizens United decision, and Jay Bybee, whose Justice Department memos attempting to rationalize torture came out shortly after he was confirmed. (Roberts was promoted to the Supreme Court after I left, in Bush's second term.)

As noted in SourceWatch (footnotes omitted), here is what unfolded at the hands of Republican operative Manny Miranda:

In 2001, Miranda was hired to serve as a counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee for Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah on nominations. He worked closely with Sean Rushton at the Committee for Justice, which was founded by tobacco scion and former White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray to get George W. Bush's judges confirmed by the Senate. In 2003, Miranda was promoted to serve as the top advisor on judicial nominations to the then-new Republican Majority Leader, Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee after Republicans won the Senate in the mid-term 2002 elections and Senator Trent Lott resigned from Republican leadership for saying he wished the segregationist Dixiecrats had won the White House in 1948. From this post, Miranda helped orchestrate campaigns, in conjunction with the Committee for Justice, against Democrats blocking President George W. Bush's judicial nominees, calling them "anti-Catholic," "anti-Hispanic," and "anti-woman," among other things, depending on the nominee's background.

In November 2003, Miranda organized a rare overnight debate on the filibusters of a handful of Bush's judicial nominees. In preparation for the start of that PR event, Miranda sent an e-mail to all Republican Senate offices urging them to wrap up any Senate business before 6:00 PM because Fox News wanted to lead off its national broadcast with a shot of Republican Senators marching onto the Senate Floor. Here is an excerpt from the official Congressional Record of November 12, 2003:

Mr. LAUTENBERG. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Minnesota. It is obvious he is outraged at the triviality that is being thrown out here about how we are violating our oath and violating our standards.

Think about this. We are now in the 32nd hour of this talkathon on judicial nominations, brought to you by the Republican Party. I guess the first 30 hours were so successful they decided to extend the hours. But instead of helping anyone promoting a good cause, Republicans are using this staged event to push for job applicants who are unfit to take the job. They are unfit, they are unqualified, they have shown they are likely to abuse their authority as circuit court judges who advance an extreme rightwing agenda and not in the best interests of America.

The Republicans so desperately wanted this talkathon to be a made-for-television movie they attempted to coordinate their efforts with FOX News, the providers of fair and balanced Republican television. It comes from the distinguished majority leader's office, one of his staff people. It says: "It is important to double your efforts to get your boss to S. 230 on time. FOX News channel is really excited about this marathon. Brit Hume at 6 would love to open with all of our 51 Senators walking onto the floor. The producer wants to know we will walk in exactly at 6:02 when the show starts so they can get it live to open Brit Hume's show. If not, can we give them an exact time for the walk in start?"

That hardly sounds like a sincere effort to me to get something done. I hear the outrage about how we are playing politics on this side. What is this? If that is not raw production, I have never seen it. Line up. I wonder if the suit colors and ties were described at the same time. It is good to see a bunch of penguins walking down here 51 deep.

FOX News presents -- it says 30 hours. They made a mistake. They didn't know how enjoyable this was, that we were going to go on with this....

(On the video, which is not easily accessible, Senator Lautenberg referred to a poster made of the e-mail from Senator Frist's office, from Miranda, although he did not mention him by name in his speech). A Republican office was apparently so offended by this effort to subordinate the business of the U.S. Senate to a commercial TV broadcast that he or she forwarded Miranda's widely disseminated broadcast e-mail to Democratic offices. Senator Frank Lautenberg and others referenced Miranda's e-mail, noting on the floor of the Senate that Senator Frist's office had attempted to orchestrate the Senate debate to coordinate with FOX News' evening broadcast.

In retaliation for these embarrassing revelations, Miranda circulated the confidential memos and draft files, which he had been secretly taking for several months from Democratic staffers' computer files without their knowledge; excerpts were published the next day in the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Some of the surreptitiously taken memos were also published by the right-wing Coalition for a Fair Judiciary (CFJ), and some of the pages that were initially posted by CFJ included electronic file stamps mentioning Miranda by name but after he initially denied he was the source of the memos the file stamps were redacted and re-posted by CFJ.

In response to the fact that Democratic Senators' confidential staff files were obviously improperly accessed for the Wall Street Journal's editorials attacking the Democrats, the Capitol Police were called to seize the Senate Judiciary Committee's computer servers, and the United States Senate Sergeant at Arms commenced a forensic investigation into what became known as "Memogate." Miranda resigned in disgrace from Senator Frist's staff, and the politically independent Sergeant at Arms issued a report detailing Miranda's dishonest actions in taking files that did not belong to him and urged that the case be referred for a criminal investigation into violations of 18 U.S.C. 1001 (lying to federal law enforcement) and various federal computer crimes. The Bush Administration chose not to prosecute Miranda. Once the evidence was indisputable, Miranda admitted he had taken the private memos to Democratic Senators, draft documents, and saved e-mails, but he asserted, among other rationales, "My parents never taught me not to read other people’s mail. They always read my mail." Senator Hatch, however, recognized that the actions of his former staffer was an "improper, unethical, and simply unacceptable breach of confidential files."

After "Memogate"

My electronic files were among those secretly copied by this G. Gordon Liddy-like creep and his pawn, Jason Lundell, along with the files of several of my Democratic colleagues, in Memogate. Although I hate to aggrandize Miranda's ego with such references that he might regard as praise, I consider Memogate to be more like "Watergate: Mission Accomplished." That's because, unlike the bungled attempt to burglarize the Democratic headquarters to obtain political strategy files, in Memogate, hundreds and hundreds of Democratic strategy memos and e-mails actually were secretly duplicated without permission. That's an act even children in grade school are taught is "stealing." (At one point, Miranda audaciously claimed that copying could not equal pilfering because the original electronic documents remained.)

These private communications among staff or to Senators were circulated to Manny Miranda's right-wing allies, like C. Boyden Gray's corporate-backed Committee for Justice, and others. I have always felt quite certain they went to the White House Counsel's office too -- if not, then mysteriously the heart of the right-wing war room on judges would have been the only place they were not circulated, since they were even shared on the floor of the U.S. Senate, according to the official Senate investigation. Given Miranda's amoral claims that he did nothing wrong in secretly taking the files through a back door in the computer server that had been unintentionally left un-secure, it is likely the confidential memos were shared more widely. I just do not think he would circulate the private memos and letters he proudly took to his friends in the right-wing press, but not to the big boys he sought to impress and help at 1600 Pennsylvania. After all, he was Senator Frist's main liaison to the White House on judicial nominations, until he was pushed out due to the scandal he caused by taking private files that didn't belong to him. I have always considered Miranda's assertions to be akin to saying that if you deadbolt the doors to your home but accidentally leave an upstairs window unlocked, anyone can take anything in your house without it being theft.

Rewarding Bad Deeds

Astonishingly, the Bush Administration later appointed Miranda to be the "Director of the Office of Legislative Statecraft" at the U.S. Embassy in Iraq's Green Zone. Unbelievable as it may be, the main perp in months and months of unethical and surreptitious copying of his political opponents' legal memos and private files in the United States Senate was rewarded with a highly-paid job, at taxpayer expense, advising the Iraqi government on legislative "statecraft" and the rule of law. The rule of law! That's a longer story for another day, except that it bears noting that between Miranda's scandalous departure from the Senate and his reward for loyalty from the Bush Administration, he was given a post at the Heritage Foundation to work on Bush's Supreme Court nominations, because the right-wing really does look after its sheep. In the ongoing effort to rehabilitate Miranda's reputation, the American Conservative Union even awarded him its highest honor, the "Ronald Reagan" Award. And, from Miranda's post at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, he was hired as an editorial columnist for a widely-circulated newspaper, which published 35 of his columns in 2005 alone. I know you know which paper it was: the Wall Street Journal, of course. And who is one of Fox News' go-to commentators on judicial nominations? None other than Manny Miranda. What a big echo chamber Fox News creates from the small-world of right-wing operatives, extremists, and hacks.

Lisa Graves is the Executive Director of the [http://www.prwatch.org Center for Media
and Democracy] based in Madison, Wisconsin.