Manuel Miranda

Memogate entered the news again during the hearings for the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, in 2018. Kavanaugh was accused of perjury for claiming he was not aware of the source of the Memogate documents, when emails between him and Miranda included as an attachment at least one document that Democrat Senator Patrick Leahy described as “stolen.” Miranda issued a statement noting again that nothing had been “stolen” and that Kavanaugh was never made aware of Democrats’ negligent publication of their own strategy memos on an open server.

In 2007 and 2008, Miranda served as a diplomat with the United States Embassy in Iraq as the first Director of the Office for Legislative Statecraft. He oversaw organizational change experts, lawyers  and programs designed to stand up the Iraqi Council of Ministers Secretariat and the Prime Minister’s Legal Office.  Miranda also worked with the Iraq and Kurdistan Bars and brokered a signed reconciliation between them that according to a 2008 USAID Report, significantly increased access to justice for the Iraqi people. In 2007, he brought Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan’s legal leaders to Washington, arranging visits for them with White House counsel, with Chief Justice John Roberts, and with key House and Senate leaders. In 2008, Miranda made news again when a memorandum to U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker was leaked.

When he retired from the Senate in late 2006, Majority Leader Bill Frist described judicial nominations as his signature issue. No Senate Majority Leader has spent more Senate floor time debating judicial nominees, and there has never been more news and editorial coverage on that issue than in 2003.  In less than one year, Republicans turned public opinion on the issue from 2 to 1 against them, to 2 to 1 for their position that every nominee deserved a vote. As a result, judicial nominations were a looming issue in the elections of 2002 and 2004 and have been in presidential and senate elections ever since. In 2004, that issue lost Democrats not only the majority but also the Senate seat of their Majority Leader, tom Daschle (D-SD). Miranda is credited for this effort and much more. To avoid the debacle experienced in 1987 with the nomination of Robert Bork, Miranda is credited with devising the “Miranda Plan,” ensuring rapid endorsement on the record of a Republican president’s Supreme Court nominees  -- a plan that has been deployed since the nomination of Chief Justice John Roberts in 2005.

At the end of 2006, Miranda made front page news when he formed another wide coalition, Families First on Immigration. Its purpose was to promote a compassionate compromise to immigration legal reform based on a seven-point program called "Good Stewards, Good Neighbor." The proposal was endorsed and summarized by Evangelical leader Tony Perkins in his 2008 book on faith and policy.

In February 2004, Miranda resigned his Senate position in an unusually public manner calling for an investigation of the Democrat memos.  His resignation letter was published in full by National Review.  His resignation also suggested a Republicans leadership surrender that launched Miranda as a conservative hero.

By January 2003, Miranda had become Judicial Affairs Counsel to the new Senate Majority Leader, Dr. Bill Frist (R-TN). As a top leadership staffer, he now rallied 51 Republican senators and their staffs on judicial nominations and orchestrated four historic Senate floor events with Vice President Dick Cheney presiding, including a continuous 40-hour debate imaging the public’s idea of a filibuster, and an unprecedented national media campaign, marshaling nationwide grassroots and grasstop support.

On November 14, 2003, on the last morning of the Senate’s 40-hour “talkathon” on judicial filibusters, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial entitled “He is Latino” that outlined a series of Senate staff memos illustrating the hand-in-glove relationship between Senate Democrats and left-wing interest groups in coordinating the obstruction of Bush judicial nominees.

In 2001, Miranda joined the staff of the United States Senate, where he was assigned to the Committee on the Judiciary as Nominations Counsel in the staff of Senator Orrin Hatch. Senate Democrats had just commenced a new strategy led by Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) to block the appellate court nominees of President George W. Bush using process requests to disguise ideological litmus tests.  Miranda quickly became a skilled strategic defender of the Bush nominees garnering significant press and public attention, especially in the nominations of Miguel Estrada and William H. Pryor Jr. Miranda stressed Estrada’s Honduran immigrant roots and argued the attack on Pryor showed anti-Catholic bigotry. The strategy infuriated opponents. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) called the Republican messaging “tawdry and diabolical.” A few days later the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Denver, the Most Rev. Charles J. Chaput, wrote a widely-published condemnation of Senate Democrats for engaging in  “a new kind of religious discrimination” against Catholics.

He attended Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service where he was the 1981 Circumnavigators Foundation Fellow, earning a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service. At Georgetown he served as the student representative on the Walsh School’s Executive Committee and as president of Alpha Phi Omega, the National Service Fraternity. (In 2016, he received from Alpha Phi Omega the Alumni Lifetime Distinguished Service Award.) While at Georgetown, in 1980 Miranda took a leave of absence to work on international refugee assistance as a Junior Operations Officer for the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (now the International Organization for Migration) at its headquarters in Geneva Switzerland, taking assignments to Madrid, Thailand and the Philippines. As the Circumnavigators Foundation Fellow, in the summer of 1981 he completed a round-the-world tour, traveling solo to 17 countries to study international responses to refugee crises.

Miranda was born in Havana in 1959. In 1962, he immigrated with his parents to Asturias, Spain, and immigrated again in 1966 to the United States, settling in New York City. He was naturalized as an American citizen along with his father and sister in 1976. He graduated with honors from Our Lady of Mount Carmel School in Astoria, Queens. He attended Archbishop Molloy High School in Ridgewood, Queens, obtaining that school’s highest graduation award, the Pvt. Louis J. Willet Scholarship.