Katherine Harris, who was simultaneously Florida Secretary of State and co-chair of Bush campaign for Florida, insisted that she had erected a "firewall" between her official duties and her extra-curricular political ones. But it appears the firewall must have cracked. An exploration of hard drives from Harris' office revealed explicitly political documents on the state-owned computers. Included among them was a document called "George W. Bush Talking Points," and a draft of a speech that included the line, "I am a bit biased. I co-chair the campaign effort of George W. Bush . . . I hope it will be W."
"Using state equipment and time for political activity falls under the state law governing misuse of public position," reported the Associated Press, paraphrasing an official with the State Commission on Ethics.
The investigation of the hard drives (commissioned by a group of media outlets including the New York Times) also revealed that numerous documents related to the Florida recount had been erased from the hard drives when they were "reformatted." According to a lawyer representing Harris' office, the files were erased by mistake. The lawyer told the New York Times, "Frankly, how many peopl e know that changing an operating system destroys records?" Well, when this reporter began the process of reformatting a computer, the following message immediately popped up on the screen: "WARNING: ALL DATA ON NON-REMOVABLE DISC DRIVE C: WILL BE LOST!"
See the Associated Press' "Media Examine Harris' Computers."
