The Harris for Senate campaign, when they're not busy advising their candidate to arch her back, has some explaining to do.
Paul Kiel, at Talking Points Memo's TPM Cafe's Daily Muck has discovered that Harris' denial of any favors in exchange for all those $2000 contributions from Mitchell Wade employees may have been, well, a lie.
More below the fold
Kiel reports that:
Last Friday, Mitchell Wade, the former president of the defense contractor MZM and one of the two who so impressively and repeatedly bribed Duke Cunningham, pled guilty. He admitted, among other things, that he illegally contributed to two Congressional campaigns. They've since been identified as Harris' and Rep. Virgil Goode's (R-VA).
But in both cases, Wade approached the Member of Congress after having delivered the contributions and asked if they wouldn't be so kind as to throw an appropriation his way. In Goode's case, that resulted in a $9M MZM facility in Goode's district.
Harris denied any favors and even said "she still had no idea what the heck MZM's motive was for giving her all that money."
Kiel solves this mystery by reading Mitchell Wade's plea:
Wade wanted something very specific from Harris: help with a defense appropriation. He even drafted a proposal and forwarded it on to her office. And she followed up on it, writing a letter to the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee asking for the money, estimated at $10M.
Kiel cites the Tom Lyon's column in the Herald Tribune :
MZM CEO Wade's plea agreement tells us that he eventually told Harris -- referred to only as "Representative B" in the court document -- exactly what MZM wanted from her.
Wade, the man who handed her a bundle of $2,000 checks, within the year took our Representative B to dinner at a Washington, D.C., restaurant, Citronelle, and asked her to help the company get a defense contract. It involved work in Navy counterintelligence.
Harris dutifully carried his funding proposal to colleagues in Congress, no matter that she knew little about the proposal or whether MZM could deliver anything of value to the nation.
No wonder she didn't want to tell us about that help to Wade.
Choosing Harris was probably a mistake for Wade. Though her public image gave some people an exaggerated notion of her influence with the Republican power structure, she had little clout on defense spending. She also filed the MZM appropriations proposal after a key deadline. MZM did not get the money.
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Wade underestimated her ability to help him get a defense contract, but it seems he was right in figuring she would be happy to help a generous donor, and keep it quiet.
Someday, when the history of the sad events befalling our country is written, it will start with Harris certifying the 2000 presidential election results for Florida. Hopefully, it will end with Ms. Harris (and many of her friends) in an orange jumpsuit.