Katharine Harris' 'War Room' Hard Drives Under Scrutiny
By Kevin Featherly, Newsbytes
TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA, U.S.A.,
01 Aug 2001, 6:32 PM CST
Computer experts hired by a consortium of newspapers and wire services at this hour are copying four computer hard drives from the offices of Florida Secretary of State Katharine Harris, as part of a broad probe into alleged impartiality by Florida's chief elections officer during the bitterly contested 2000 presidential election.
The effort is intended to help determine if two well-known Republican operatives working in Harris' office while the election hung in the balance were exerting improper political influence over key decisions – especially Harris' decision to liberally interpret laws governing heavily Republican absentee ballots.
Bush won the election by 537 votes after a much-disputed U.S. Supreme Court ruling that stopped all ballot-counting. The Times report last month says that more than 680 "questionable" absentee ballots were counted in Bush's favor, more than enough potentially to tip the scales.
Ontrack, a Minneapolis computer data-recovery firm, is recording mirror images of the drives this afternoon, and will take them to the Twin Cities to be thoroughly examined. The company has not yet looked over any of the data, according to Ontrack legal consultant Kristin Nimsger, who spoke with Newsbytes this afternoon from Tallahassee.
The effort to examine the computers' contents follows a July 15 New York Times report that accused to two Republican strategists – J.M. Stipanovich and Adam Goodman, both from Florida – of working in Harris' office in the three weeks after the election, all the while maintaining contact and trading information with Republican attorneys and campaign officials.
Harris has denied the allegations, saying she built "a firewall" around herself to insulate her office from outside political influence during the disputed contest.
John Wark, state bureau chief of the Tampa Tribune, told Newsbytes that two of the computers are of particular interest. Wark, whose paper is among those participating in the investigation, said those two machines were in "the war room," a conference space in Harris' office where the strategists worked. Harris said the men functioned as spokespeople for her office, because she had no public relations specialists working for her before the election controversy exploded.
"I think there's historical interest in what information might be retrievable from the computer hard drives," Wark said. "We don't know if there is incriminating material there."
The presence of Republican operatives working with Harris alone suggests possible impropriety, Wark said. "There's no evidence that she has conducted herself in a way that was not fair and aboveboard," the editor said. "But I think the very fact that she had these two political advisers in her office during that time raises questions about whether or not she did have a firewall erected around herself to keep out party influence."
But the Times story suggests much more than that. The report, which combined the efforts of 18 Times reporters, said that the strategists prepared statements to county election officials on behalf of Harris over what kind of absentee ballots could be accepted as legal votes. Initial document drafts differed from the final drafts, Wark said.
"The final drafts suggested a pretty liberal standard," Wark said.
The Times report said Stipanovich admitted he did talk to attorneys for President Bush during the time the absentee ballot advisory was being drafted.
"But when we asked Stipanovich yesterday if he had been talking with attorneys for the Bush camp or anyone in the Republican Party, he said, 'I talked to a lot of people and I'm not going to go into anymore details than that.'"
Wark said the computer hard drives could contain evidence not only of various drafts of the absentee-ballot advisory that was handed out to various county election boards, but also possibly e-mails. If it's true that contact was made between Harris' office and the Bush camp, it might indicate that the president's campaign played some role in manipulating the Florida election in their own favor, Wark said.
"In a worst-case scenario, I suppose it's possible," he said. "It's more probable, I suppose, that there may simply be evidence that these two political advisers for the Republican Party working inside the Secretary of State's office were in contact with the political party outside, the Bush camp outside, and that information flowed back and forth."
Even in that case, Wark said, "That would suggest some concern in the secretary of state's office for the position of the Republican Party."
The Times report said the two "war room" computers in Harris' office may have been reformatted since the election contest, possibly erasing data from that time. However, Ontrack's Nimsger told Newsbytes her company learned today that they apparently never were reformatted.
Two other computers, in other parts of the office, were reformatted so new workers could use them, she said, a process that is common in workplaces. Those two computers will also be mirror-imaged and analyzed, she said.
"They are there and (the analysis) is just a verification that there is, in fact, no data on them that would be relevant, so they can exclude them as being relevant," Nimsger said. And if there is relevant data even on the reformatted disks, Ontrack data-retrieval expert Stewart Hanley said much of that might be recoverable as well.
Harris initially refused to hand over the computers for examination, saying that computer hard drives are not subject to Florida's liberal open-government "sunshine laws" that cover open records. She also said that some of the e-mail on the machines was private and shouldn't be subjected to scrutiny. However, Florida's Democratic attorney general disagreed, and Harris recently relented, allowing the press to analyze the machines.
Wark said, specifically, the newspapers will be looking for:
- Evidence that other draft statements were made on the computers, and various drafts that were used.
- E-mail or memos pertaining to other issues that came up during the election recount that may be of historical interest.
- Evidence that the advisers were in contact with Republican Party operatives involved in the recount, or with national and state Republican Party officials.
- Evidence that the computers used by the political advisers either were used to draft the statements about absentee ballots, or were not.
"Did they help? We don't know," Wark said. "They said they did not. We interviewed both men for a story that ran today and they said they did not influence that decision in any way, and did not have formal conversations about that policy with the secretary or anybody in her office."
Ontrack said the process of analyzing and evaluating the hard drive images could take between two and four days.
The news operations involved in the investigation include the New York Times, The Tampa Tribune, The St. Petersburg Times, The Miami Herald, The Orlando Sentinel, The South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Florida Times - Union, The Associated Press, Gannett Newspapers, Tallahassee Democrat, Palm Beach Post and Daytona Beach News-Journal.
A separate investigation, also including the New York Times and other news operations, involves hired experts who are examining all ballots cast in Florida during the election to see if the official count was affected by faulty voting machines. Results from that study are due later this summer, according to the Times.
Reported by Newsbytes.com, newsbytes.com .
18:32 CST
Reposted 20:09 CST
(20010801/WIRES TOP, ONLINE, LEGAL/KHARRIS |
