Herald: Harris Whispered about Scarborough’s “Dead Intern”

I tell you, that stampede of staffers fleeing Rep. Katherine Harris’ (R-FL) Senate campaign is becoming a goldmine. They probably had to leave all their work materials behind — but the anecdotes they took with them are priceless.

Here’s one on how Harris herself used the death of a staffer from Joe’s earlier congressional campaign as the basis of a smear effort to preempt his Senate run:

… Republican insiders… 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.

Harris, through a spokeswoman, denied Scarborough’s account, saying she ”would never insinuate publicly or privately” that he did anything untoward.

But her former staff members say they expected her to deny the previously untold anecdote, which they say marked the beginning of the Harris campaign’s tailspin.