The fourth and final day of evidentiary hearings by the North Carolina State Board of Elections into election fraud in the NC-09 race between Mark Harris (R) and Dan McCready (D) more than lived up to expectations for drama — plus a surprise ending that no one saw coming.
In the first three days of the hearing, damning evidence had piled up proving the Harris campaign’s good-ol-boy contractor, McCrae Dowless, employed drug abusers and others to feloniously ‘harvest’ absentee-by-mail ballots in NC-09’s Bladen County, fraudulently alter those ballots, and otherwise cast a pall over the credibility of an election that saw Harris with a 905 vote lead over McCready on election night.
Day 3 of the hearing had opened with a surprise witness, Mark Harris’ son, John Harris (an Assistant U.S. Attorney with the Justice Department), testifying that he had warned his father in an email that Dowless’ operation in Bladen County was obviously illegal (a warning his father chose to ignore).
Day 4 dawned this morning with equally stunning revelations — that Harris’s attorneys had failed to produce that email in response to the State Board’s December 2018 subpoena for all evidence related to Harris’s involvement with Dowless. Instead, they produced it only moments before Harris Jr. took the stand of his own accord yesterday to testify against his father. Democratic attorney Marc Elias, representing Harris’s opponent, Dan McCready, then elicited the further shocker that Harris’s attorneys had also failed to produce evidence from Harris campaign staffers’ email accounts, offering as their excuse that everyone on the Harris campaign, from the campaign manager on down, were all subcontractors employed by the campaign’s consultant, Red Dome Group, and not by the Harris campaign, and thus were judged by Harris’s attorneys to not fall within the scope of the subpoena the campaign had received.
But all that was nothing compared to what would come next today, as candidate Harris himself took the stand in an eagerly awaited appearance. To most observers, including myself, it seemed impossible for Harris to avoid either perjuring himself on the stand or else admitting under oath to the felony of election fraud.
Harris, looking fit and chipper, easily navigated his way through the morning segment of his testimony under examination by the State Board of Elections’ sympathetic director, Kim Strach — an effort that was intended only to get the facts of the matter into evidence before Democratic Party attorneys would later cross-examine Harris rather more energetically. After about an hour of Harris answering Strach’s questions with “I never knew” or “I never had any idea” more times than I could count, the Board’s chairman declared a one-hour lunch break.
And that’s when all Hell broke loose.
Returning from lunch, the Board’s chairman announced that matters arising over the last hour required the Board’s five members to go into a brief closed session. Upon their return, Harris was called back to the stand and asked the Board’s permission to read a brief statement:
It's been brought to my attention that I talked to my son, my younger son, Matthew, that I referenced earlier, two nights ago about the fact that I did not think John's emails would be part of this hearing. Obviously I was incorrect in my recollection, and I wholeheartedly apologize to this board. On January 18th I went to the hospital. After battling what we thought was bronchitis I developed a severe infection that actually caused me to become septic. In the process of that illness I experienced two strokes, from which I'm still recovering. Though I thought I was ready to undergo the rigors of this hearing and am getting stronger, I clearly am not, and I struggled this morning with both recall and confusion. Neither I nor any of the leadership of my campaign were aware of or condoned the improper activities that have been testified to in this hearing.
Through the testimony I've listened to over the past three days, I believe a new election should be called. It has become clear to me that the public's confidence in the Ninth District seat general election has been undermined to an extent that a new election is warranted.
Harris then rose, left the stand, and exited the hearing room, never to return. He was permitted to do so because he was not under subpoena to testify.
The Board then quickly voted unanimously to call for a new election in NC-09, and adjourned the hearing.
Whether Harris’s problem is really “two strokes”— or maybe just three strikes — his move was a stroke of genius. Timed as it was immediately after he had spent an hour denying any knowledge of election fraud activities by his contractor, and immediately before Democratic super-lawyer Marc Elias was poised to hand Harris his ass on a plate, Harris evaded the equally disastrous alternatives of perjury or an admission of guilt on the stand under Elias’s no doubt withering cross-examination.
No word yet whether Harris will run again in the new primary and subsequent general election do-overs that the Board has ordered. But I’m sure we all offer him our thoughts and prayers as he struggles to recover from his recent stroke of genius.
Please join me in making even just a small donation to Democrat Dan McCready’s campaign as he prepares to once again fight for his legitimate seat representing the good people of NC-09.