Katherine Harris and the Cunningham bribery fiasco

Just when we thought things couldn't get any worse for Florida Senate hopeful Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Sarasota), Vanity Fair reporter Judy Bachrach re-plumbs her ties to the Duke Cunningham bribery scandal.

Harris is featured in three solid paragraphs in the story, which details how the Cunningham fiasco promises to keep yielding scandalous fruit. At issue are Harris' ties to Mitchell Wade, the ex-Pentagon official whose MZM military contracting operation foundered for years before he learned the art of bribery. Then-Rep. Harris turned out to be an easy mark:

Two years ago, Katherine Harris (best known as the Florida secretary of state who presided over the agonizing 2000 presidential recount, and now more obliquely known in court papers as "Rep. B") went to dinner with Wade - whom she had met through Cunningham - and subsequently got a stack of $2,000 checks for her campaign signed by his employees. Many were written on the same day. Harris would later say she had hardly any idea why -- maybe they just liked her politics. (In all, Wade gave her $32,000 in illegal contributions.)

But, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Wade told Harris exactly what he wanted over the dinner, for which he paid $2,800 at Citronelle, an elegant Washington restaurant: lots of federal funding to build a $10 million counter-intelligence facility in her Florida district. They also discussed the possibility of his throwing her a fund-raiser. In vain did Ed Rollins, who was then Harris's campaign strategist, warn the congresswoman (who is not allowed to receive gifts exceeding $50) that a $2,800 dinner and a fund-raiser might be interpreted as a shady quid pro quo for snagging millions of dollars for her benefactor. "Mitch, what a special evening! The best dinner I have ever enjoyed in Washington.... Please let me know if I can ever be of assistance," a thrilled Harris wrote by hand in a letter given to me by a former MZM employee. (After insisting she had "reimbursed" the restaurant for the meal, Harris switched positions recently, saying, "I have donated to a local Florida charity $100, which will more than adequately compensate for the cost of my beverage and appetizer.")

In 2005, Harris had a second dinner with Wade, for which, a friend of his tells me, he paid more than $3,300, and a few months later a Harris aide named Mona Tate Yost was hired by MZM. Although a Harris spokeswoman initially said Yost's contacts with her old congressional office were "purely on a social level," this too turned out to be false. An e-mail I have seen, written in 2005, indicates Yost had promised to approach a top Harris staffer "with a meeting." She was working on an MZM draft of a legislative-funding proposal that would, Wade hoped, underwrite his $10 million counter-intelligence facility. (Yost didn't return phone calls for comment.) An MZM employee, Kay Coles James, e-mailed the company's draft to Harris's office, which ultimately submitted it to the appropriations committee, with some of the language intact. (Possibly because Harris applied for the funding late and the request was ill-written, the money never was allocated. "I think Mitch made a mistake in trying to bribe Harris," a Capitol Hill source says, chuckling. "She's so incompetent she can't be bribed.")

That doesn't sound good. A recent poll finds Harris still trails her Democratic rival Bill Nelson by 33 points, and only 35% of Republicans support her as the GOP nominee.