Last year, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's top aide on judiciary matters, Manuel Miranda, was fired for peeking at secret Democratic memos. With the investigation into Miranda seemingly going nowhere, The Hill's eNews reports that Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin wants a new prosecutor appointed in the case.

Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.), the assistant Democratic Senate leader, has sent a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales demanding that he assign a new U.S. attorney to investigate what has become known as Memogate. Last year, Manuel Miranda, a top aide to Senate Majority Leader Bill First (R-Tenn.), resigned from his Senate job after admitting to reading internal Democratic strategy memos on the Judiciary Committee computer network. The Senate sergeant at arms referred its investigation of the matter to the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of New York, but since then little has been heard on the matter. Some of the memos, which had been stored on an unsecure Judiciary Committee server, were posted on the Web and reported on by the media in 2003, enraging Senate Democrats. In his letter, Durbin said that Miranda now heads an organization known as the Third Branch Conference, a coalition of grassroots conservative groups, serves as an adviser to various lawmakers on judicial issues and may be using his knowledge of the memos "to further his career." Durbin asked Gonzales to assign the investigation to the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts whose office "was able to successfully conclude an investigation into the illegal electronic access of hotel heiress Paris Hilton's cell phone." Durbin said that it's unclear what progress the U.S. attorney in New York has made on the investigation and that "repeated attempts to discover the status of the investigation have been unsuccessful." Miranda said Durbin is trying to create a distraction because conservative groups plan on asking Durbin and Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), both members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to ask for the release of the full complement of memos that the Senate sergeant at arms still has in his possession as a result of last year's investigation. "I didn't expect the desperation showed by the extent they're willing to go to distract from the memos," said Miranda, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, who added that he believed Durbin was also retaliating against him for his written opinions.

This one's a sticky situation, but it seems that if Miranda did break the law by peeking and possibly disseminating Democratic Party memos (which may or may not be the case), he should be investigated.