The story of ‘Joe’s dead intern’

July 14, 2006

I’ve heard a lot of odd stories about Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla.) and her misguided Senate campaign, but this is a new one.

Katherine Harris’ floundering U.S. Senate campaign lost its high-level staff again this week and is groping for a message — which doesn’t surprise Republican insiders who trace the seeds of her trouble to the story of “Joe’s dead intern.”

This wasn’t any old Joe. It was Joe Scarborough, host of the prime-time MSNBC show Scarborough Country and a former Pensacola Republican congressman who was courted last summer by national Republicans to run against Harris. But before he could announce he wouldn’t, Harris called major donors and suggested Scarborough would have to answer questions about the strange death of a former staff member in 2001, according to two former high-level Harris staff members, a GOP donor and Scarborough.

“That was the first clue that something wasn’t right with Katherine Harris,” Scarborough told The Miami Herald in a recent interview, noting that a medical examiner found his staff member’s death was natural and not the result of foul play.

“This [story] encapsulates everything wrong with her as a candidate,” former campaign manager Jim Dornan said. ‘She reacted without thinking. She made stuff up. She called people she had no business calling. And when confronted with the insanity of her — I use this term lightly — ‘strategy,’ she denied it and tried to blame someone else.”

I had to read that a couple of times to make sure I was reading it right. Apparently, worried that Scarborough might enter the race, Harris personally called key Republicans to insinuate that Scarborough may have been involved with the death of an intern. One former campaign manager overheard Harris tell more than one donor, “I don’t know what he’s thinking when he’s got this whole issue of a dead intern on his hands.”

This isn’t hardball campaigning; it’s pathological.

I’ve often wondered what kind of twisted person would help steal a presidential election. Now I know.

“‘She reacted without thinking. She made stuff up. She called people she had no business calling. And when confronted with the insanity of her — I use this term lightly — ‘strategy,’ she denied it and tried to blame someone else.”

Geebus, doesn’t this sound typical of pretty much every major player in the Republican party? Seriously!

  • Exactly what I was going to say Curmudgeon. With a straight face.

    This is right out of the GOP playbook, and for them to pretend her actions were in some way objectionable to them is pure bullshit. If Joe Scarborough was a Democrat preparing to run against Harris, those orders would have come from Rove before she could so much as utter them.

    They never liked her, but were stuck with her after 2000. She IS a loose cannon, and that’s part of their problem with her, but this is just excuse-making bullshit.

    Am I really supposed to believe she was too hardballl for the GOP? Please.

  • That’s a little lower than the California Republican suggesting his primary opponent not be elected because he has a Pacemaker and it would be expensive for the state to hold a special election when he keels over.

    As crass and tasteless as this is, it’s standard fare for Republicans. It’s nice to see them turn on each other.

  • Karl Rove with tits, hair, and a more shapely booty.

    Yikes…

    Except if it was Karl…. the intern would be painted as a gay pederast who knew something super juicy about sneaky Joe.
    And he would have paid illegal immigrants a pittance to leave such messagea under 100,000 windshield wipers….

    Even when they play unfair, republican women aren’t as brutally diabolical as republican men often are…

  • Harris must be confused by the negative reaction. What, slanderous, baseless, evidence-free assaults on a political opponent’s character are wrong? Then why was the primary activity of the entire g-dam Republican party doing in the Clinton years?

  • First rule of “swiftboating”:Don’t leave fingerprints. While we can be sure that Rove has no problem Harris’ smearing a potential rival, he likely disapproves of her not using a surrogate. I can hear him now on the phone to Harris,”Tsk,tsk, tsk,……Katie you know you have to have plausible deniability.”

  • The woman is absolutely barking mad…..methinks there’s a straightjacket
    somewhere missing its occupant….

  • If Harris loses in November, I hope someone on our side has the sense to whip her off to some safe house and get her to start dictating her story of how she stole the 2000 election, because I think she is likely to go the way of Joe’s Intern.

    Suggest that to her the next time you see her 😉

  • She would be a splendid senator. I hope she gets elected and is assigned a seat next to Alaska Senator Stevens. Great stuff for Stewart and Colbert!

  • Lance has a good point; if Harris loses in November, she just might be mad enough to dump on the Bush family for not backing her after all she did for them in 2000.

  • I wouldn’t personally consider this a mark against Harris, since it is a reasonable suspicion to voice in the Scarborough dead intern matter. Of course, Joe himself would decry any such suggestion as bull (as the quotes above show to be true), but the incident was oddly given very little attention in the media (no scandal associated to Joe), and yet he resigns from Congress abruptly, shortly after the incident, amid rampant rumors of marital difficulties.

    The medical examiner oddly immediately claimed he could rule out foul play, only to have to admist that massive blunt trauma to the head was the cause of death. Seems the otherwise apparently healthy young lady marathon runner in her 20s had a hidden heart condition that caused her to faint, thus falling into a piece of furniture or fixture hard enough to kill her. Then it turned out that the medical examiner had been dismissed from his prior job in a bordering state for falsifying the cause of death in another case. Corruption in the office of the medical examiner is often the key to covering up a murder, and this guy appeared to be picked for that role out of general casting.

    No, rather than illustrate the supposed mental issues of Ms. Harris, for whom I hold no brief or any feelings but contempt and anger at her corrupt actions in ’00, I think this is better taken as an insider’s look at (or under) the storyline with which the national media dismissed this incident (the local Pensacola paper did far better coverage of the issues). Or, if indeed Joe was entirely innocent of anything in this matter, it still provides us an insider’s view of what normally goes on (even if it didn’t in this case), which insider’s would automatically assume to be the case in any given situation.

  • Thanks, sofla… I was trying to remember what went with old “only common sense allowed” joe, and now I know why… not much was written.

  • Since I haven’t seen any reference to it here (or anyplace else) today, let me wish everyone a Happy Bastille Day. FWIW, my greetings are ici (have your sound on).

  • I was just getting ready to say what ‘sofla’ just said, but ‘sofla’ said it better than I could. To add one thing: Joe S may well have been involved with the dead intern. (Jeez, what would the newspapers have done — not to mention the GOP — if Lewinsky was found dead in Clinton’s office!!!) Perhaps it was an accident. Perhaps not. Perhaps Harris knows a bit more about this event than everyone else does. After all, she may be in a position to know where the bodies are buried (sorta literally). Too bad that a possible crime was covered up and a young woman is dead with no justice to her being done. Where was CNN when THIS woman was killed? Thought that young murdered white women was their forte…

  • I was also going to say what Sofia said.

    I think this should be seen as Harris, not the brightest of bulbs, just repeating, angrily, the gossip that has probably circulated for years in Florida Republican circles.

    Is there enough evidence to denounce Scarborough? Nah, but it’s still a major miscarriage of justice that a “real” investigation never took place. If Skakel could be tried decades after the fact, Scarborough may yet have to take the stand on this one.

    Who really knows how much Republican dirt has been swept under the rug since Reagan was elected?

  • Fascinating point @ Lance

    Man…. you are right…
    The many skeletons in her closet all have boners…

    Truly…
    That is some serious fertile night soil…
    Anybody out there know if she fucked Jeb as well?

    Or is that just a happy rumor being passed around in Sunday school?

  • Thanks to sofla and other concuring opinions for the alternative perspective. As much trouble and malfeasance that as been abetted by Ms. Harris, she doesn’t strike me as Rovian evil so much as she reminds me of my Mom’s mega-informed hairdresser who she’s been going to for years and who can with the flick of a phrase or word, get a misguided story on track or instantly confirm/dismiss any rumour.

    “I don’t know what he’s thinking when he’s got this whole issue of a dead intern on his hands.” has a nice matter of fact quality to it that makes me think she’s got a secret or at least a pretty good idea.

    R.I.P. Ms. Intern. You deserved better than to get mixed up with these assholes.

  • let me echo what sofla and others have brought up here…tho harris may be nuts and may only be repeating gossip she’s heard, there are (or were) enough questions and unanswered puzzles in the case to warrant further inspection, both at the time it happened, and now, tho it probably won’t be forthcoming.

    among the questions were the medical examiner’s incompetence, including his suspended license from another state for falsifying data in other cases, plus the medical examiner’s immediate supervisor’s contributions (possibly over the federal legal limit) to scarborough’s campaign.

    we make the case, with sites and sources over at skippy.

    as to the difference between scarborough and conduit (whose nationally televised scandal happened about the same time, give or take a few months, as joe’s dead intern, whom nobody heard about), please see this piece in the democratic underground: tale of the tape.

  • Give me a break, you people are no better than the Right wing freaks that kept parroting the Clinton is a murderer crap. Yes, I’m sure that Scarborough figured that he was going to need a corrupt medical examiner, and made sure that one was hired for his district, so he could kill young girls with impunity. The charges that no real investigation took place is specious at best. Has anyone that was involved in the investigation or anyone close to someone involved in the investigation come forward to say there was either a cover-up or negligence? Instead it is just a bunch of crap repeated en masse by a bunch of nimrods with no real evidence or knowledge of the case. The difference between Condit and Scarborough? In Condits case there was obvious and definite foul play, along with a mystery. In Scarborough’s case there was a body, and an investigation found that she had an undetected underlying heart problem, not uncommon even in world class athletes, which caused her to faint and smack her head on a piece of furniture. You can claim that there was a cover-up but there is little credible evidence, other than a ridiculous claim that the supervisor was a campaign contributor. What I truly hate about the right is their constant ability to ignore both facts and common sense and believe whatever crap is spewed from the Coulters and Falwells, etc. You people on this post are only proving that you are the other side of the same shitty coin. You do nobody any good and simply cloud the real debate with your stupidity

  • Seems the otherwise apparently healthy young lady marathon runner in her 20s had a hidden heart condition that caused her to faint, thus falling into a piece of furniture or fixture hard enough to kill her. Then it turned out that the medical examiner had been dismissed from his prior job in a bordering state for falsifying the cause of death in another case.

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