Manuel Miranda

Manuel A. Miranda (born 1959) is an American attorney, diplomat, journalist, and political advocate.

He served as a diplomat at the Embassy of the United States, Baghdad as the first Director of the Office of Legislative Statecraft.

Miranda also led U.S. Senate efforts to seat the judicial nominees of President George W. Bush as Republican Senior Nominations Counsel on the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary and Judicial Affairs Counsel to then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.

Miranda was born in Havana, Cuba 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.

In 1980, while at Georgetown, Miranda took a leave of absence to work on international refugee assistance as a Junior Operations Officer for the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration, which is now the International Organization for Migration, at its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, where he was assigned to Madrid, Thailand, and the Philippines.

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.

As the Circumnavigators Foundation Fellow, in the summer of 1981 he completed a round-the-world tour, traveling alone to 17 countries to study international responses to refugee crises.

During Miranda's time at Georgetown University, he helped found the Stewards Society.

Miranda attended law school at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, where he was the first Charles Rummel Scholar.

He served as chief research editor of the International & Comparative Law Review, as president of Phi Delta Phi, and he worked as research associate to the dean and chancellor.

Miranda has been admitted without interruption to the Bar of the State of New York for over 30 years, as well as to the Maryland Bar.

Before public service, he had a long legal career at some of the world's most prominent international law firms, including with White & Case, Reid & Priest, and Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam & Roberts, where he began his career in the canyons of Wall Street.

His clients included Mobil Oil Corporation, Ramada Renaissance, International Finance Corporation, InterAmerican Development Bank, Bank of America, Irving Trust, Bank of New York, Credit Lyonnais, National Grid (UK), Caterpillar, PEMEX, BHP Power, and King Ranch.

Miranda’s earliest expertise, however, grew in the area of corporate governance.

He has organized and structured a number of non-profit organizations, including guiding some in internecine struggles for control.

The most notable representation in this area included a four- year litigation over the control of Georgetown University’s alumni association and alumni annual fund.

Fought against Washington’s Williams & Connolly, at the end Miranda won and was recognized by the court as the legal representative of all Georgetown alumni.

The groundbreaking case, decided on summary judgement, established the law of the District of Columbia on a number of corporate governance issues.

Georgetown settled at the end, wrapping up that and all related actions.

At Russin & Vecchi, Miranda represented, among others, the Russian Orthodox Church of America, including advice in internecine battles over the control of parish corporate boards and a national, year-long audit of the Church’s exposure.

He has assisted clients in immigration, corporate governance and crisis management, and as canon law counsel to Oscar-winning screenwriter and producer of The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty, winning for him a favorable result at the Vatican in a case against Georgetown University.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When he retired from the Senate in late 2006, Majority Leader Bill Frist described judicial nominations as his signature issue.

In 2016, he was awarded Alpha Phi Omega's Alumni Lifetime Distinguished Service Award.