Virtual Watergate?

From the Globe, don't miss it:

Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary
Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year,
monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on
copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.

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 revelation comes as the battle of judicial nominees is
reaching a new level of intensity. Last week, President Bush used
his recess power to appoint Judge Charles Pickering to the Fifth
Circuit Court of Appeals, bypassing a Democratic filibuster that
blocked a vote on his nomination for a year because of concerns
over his civil rights record.

Democrats now claim their private memos formed the basis for a
February 2003 column by conservative pundit Robert Novak that
revealed plans pushed by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of
Massachusetts, to filibuster certain judicial nominees. Novak is
also at the center of an investigation into who leaked the
identity of a CIA agent whose husband contradicted a Bush
administration claim about Iraqi nuclear programs.