Where's Manny?(The Talk of the Town)(Manuel Miranda)

One of the lesser mysteries in Washington, D.C., in recent years concerned Manuel Miranda. For a time, he achieved a kind of ubiquity in the capital's political and legal culture, but, shortly after the Democrats took over Congress in 2006, he seemed to vanish. What, some wondered, had become of Manny?

Early in the George W. Bush Presidency, Miranda came to public notice as a fiercely partisan aide to the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee. He moved to the staff of Bill Frist, who was Senate Majority Leader at the time, and orchestrated a series of noisy attempts--including an all-night Senate session--to win confirmation for Bush's judicial nominations. In November, 2003, after internal documents belonging to Democrats on the committee were leaked, the Senate opened an investigation that revealed that Miranda, through a quirk in the computer system, had been reading his adversaries' e-mails and sharing them with right-leaning news outlets like the Washington Times. Senator Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, called Miranda's actions "improper, unethical, and simply unacceptable." Miranda resigned, and a criminal investigation of him was initiated.

Miranda then surfaced as the leader of an organization that came to be called the Third Branch Conference--a private lobbying group dedicated to pushing for confirmation of Bush's conservative judicial nominations. Working out of a Capitol Hill town house, Miranda organized conference calls of conservative activists, sent e-mail blasts to reporters, and regularly appeared on television as a booster for Bush's judges. In the summer and fall of 2005, Miranda helped orchestrate support for John G. Roberts, Jr., as Chief Justice, and opposition to the short-lived nomination to the Court of Harriet Miers, which Miranda called "a significant failure." As for Samuel A. Alito, Jr., who replaced Miers as the nominee, Miranda called the choice "a grand slam." After that, there was silence from Miranda. (The criminal investigation went nowhere.)

Then, a couple of weeks ago, Miranda sent a group message to his old e-mail list that closed with his current title: "Director, Office of Legislative Statecraft, State Department, U.S. Embassy, Baghdad." Say what?

"In August of 2005, I got an e-mail saying that the embassy had a need for someone with private-practice and ...