Katherine Harris - MZM Scandal

MZM Scandal

In 2005 and 2006, a major corporate campaign donor to Harris, Mitchell Wade (founder of defense contractor MZM), was implicated in several bribery scandals. The improprieties were said to have occurred from 2004 through 2006. One alleged incident of attempted bribery resulted in the criminal conviction and resignation of California congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham, as well as the conviction of Mitchell Wade of MZM (now renamed "Athena Innovative Solutions"). Wade had bundled together and donated to Harris's campaign $32,000 in contributions from his employees at MZM, Inc., then reimbursed those employees for the contributions.

Regarding this issue, U.S. Attorney Kenneth Wainstein has recently said that Harris did not appear to know the donations were obtained illegally. Harris has maintained she had no personal knowledge that her campaign was given illegal contributions. Wade admitted that the donations to the Harris campaign were illegal and were part of an attempt to influence Harris to MZM's benefit.

Documents filed with Wade's plea say that he took Harris to dinner in March 2005, a year after the illegal contributions, where they discussed the possibility of another fundraiser and the possibility of getting funding for a Navy counterintelligence program placed in Harris's district.

Harris subsequently sent a letter on April 26, 2005 to defense appropriations subcommittee Chairman C. W. Bill Young, in which Harris sought $10 million for a Navy project backed by Wade. In the letter, Harris emphasized the importance of the project, asking that it be added to her list of five priorities and identifying it as her new No. 3. Harris later released the April 26, 2005 letter for legal scrutiny, but neither she nor Young would turn over the request form (RFP) used for the proposal.

CQPolitics noted "Harris’s former political strategist, Ed Rollins, spoke on the record about the dinner and detailed a meal that cost $2,800, far in excess of the $50 limit on gifts that members of Congress are allowed to accept" at the Washington restaurant Citronelle. Wade and Harris discussed MZM's desire for a $10 million appropriation, and Wade offered to host a fundraiser for Harris's 2006 Senate campaign. Regarding the MZM contributions, the Sentinel article goes on to say "The Justice Department has said Wade, who personally handed many of the checks to Harris, did not tell Harris the contributions were illegal". Regarding the expensive meal, the article quotes Harris as saying that she personally had only a "beverage and appetizer" worth less than "$100". House rules prohibit accepting any gift worth $50 or more.

Rollins said that he had conducted a thorough internal investigation into Harris's ties to MZM in hopes of finding conclusive proof of her innocence; but when he could not, he and other advisers, including her lawyer, urged her to drop her candidacy rather than risk federal corruption charges. Although he did not believe Harris intentionally broke any laws, "her story kept changing. Our great concern was that you get into trouble when you don't tell the same story twice ... Maybe you don't think you did anything wrong, but then maybe you start getting questioned about it and so forth, and you may perjure yourself. ... Unlike Cunningham, I don't think she set out to violate the law, but I think she was very careless. She heard whatever she wanted to hear, but we could find no evidence whatsoever that this was a project going into her district."

Although Rollins recalled discussing the $2,800 meal with Harris, Harris told the Orlando Sentinel on April 19, 2006, that the cost of the meal was "news to me", and that her campaign had since "reimbursed" the restaurant for the cost of the meal. According to the reporter, when questioned as to why she would reimburse the restaurant for a meal that had been paid for by MZM, Harris abruptly terminated the interview, and her spokesman later called and requested unsuccessfully that the story not be printed. The next day, Harris's campaign issued a statement that she had believed her campaign had reimbursed the restaurant, and that she had donated $100 "which will more than adequately compensate for the cost of my beverage and appetizer". Harris also asserted that most of the cost of the meal was from Wade ordering several unopened bottles of wine to take home, although the management of the restaurant denies ever allowing anyone to take unopened bottles of wine off the premises, saying "Why would we jeopardize our liquor license for the sake of selling a couple bottles of wine?"

In the weeks following the expensive meal, former senior Harris staffers claimed that "they initially rejected a defense contractor's $10 million appropriation request last year but reversed course after being instructed by Harris to approve it."

In May 2006, Harris's campaign spokesman Christopher Ingram acknowledged that she had also had a previous dinner with Wade in the same restaurant in March 2004, when the $32,000 in illegal donations had been given to her campaign. Ingram told the press that he did not know how much that meal cost, but that a charitable donation of an unknown amount had been given to a charity whose name he did not know, equivalent to her share of the meal. "She takes responsibility for the oversight that there was no reimbursement," he said.

Mona Tate Yost, an aide to Harris, left to work for MZM during the time Wade was pressing Harris to secure federal funding (April or May 2005).

On July 17, 2006, Ed Rollins confirmed that Justice Department lawyers and FBI agents had recently questioned her about the $32,000 in donations. Rollins noted: "I assume more will be coming, though. They were very serious."

On September 7, 2006, Federal investigators questioned Jim Dornan, who quit as Harris's campaign manager the previous November.