Mr. Curtis goes to Washington, Part 1

The 24th Congressional District of Florida is spans a broad swathe of eastern-central part of the peninsula, including portions of Brevard, Orange, Seminole, and Volusia Counties. It includes Kennedy Space Center and all of its attendent industries, as well as Daytona Beach, always a biker mecca and now a secondary locale for collegiate spring break revels. It is also one of the more conservative areas of the state, traditionally voting Republican, and, of late, attracting migrants from elsewhere in the nation who find it (relatively) reasonable cost of living and white, Christian homogeneity comforting.

Last weekend, I journeyed up to the red zone to lend 2 days to the dark horse campaign of Clint Curtis for the 24th Congressional District seat on Capitol Hill. He is running on the Democratic ticket against Republican incumbent Tom Feeney.

Clint Curtis is a computer programmer who once worked for Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI), a computer consulting firm in Oviedo, Florida. On December 6th, 2004, the Brad Blog published a sworn affidavit by the soft-spoken Curtis. In his affidavit and later videotaped sworn testimony presented before members of the U.S. House Judiciary committee, Curtis claims to have been asked by Feeney to design a "vote-rigging software prototype". This request took place in October 2000 during a meeting at Yang.

At the time of the alleged meeting, Feeney was the incoming Speaker of the Florida House, and also a registered lobbyist and the general corporate counsel for YEI. Previously, he had been the running mate of Jeb Bush during his 1994 unsuccessful first bid for Florida Governor. He eventually ascended to the U.S. Congress and today sits on the House Judiciary Committee.

Curtis, a life-long Republican up until then, had been a programmer at YEI, which had several top-secret clearance contracts with the state, NASA and other government agencies. Curtis' understanding at the time was that the prototype he was being asked to create (built to the very precise specifications of Feeney) was to address Feeney's concerns that the Democrats might attempt to electronically rig the election and Feeney wanted to know what to look out for in that event. After informing YEI CEO Mrs. Li-Woan Yang that he would not be able to hide the vote-flipping routines in the software source-code as Feeney had requested, Curtis testified that Mrs. Yang informed him that the program was needed to "rig the vote in South Florida."

Curtis also reported in his affidavit and to the Florida State Inspector General that YEI was employing an illegal Chinese alien by the name of Hai Lin "Henry" Nee who was inserting "wire-tapping modules" into sensitive database programs which YEI had built for NASA and other companies.

Tom Feeney has categorically denied all charges made by Curtis and has refused to comment on the record about any of the allegations beyond telling MSNBC that "Curtis has defamed a lot of people. . .

After many months and many requests and many challenges from both critics and Mainstream Media types, The St. Petersburg Times reports that Clint Curtis took a polygraph test on March 3rd, 2005...and passed.

The lie-detector test, administered by Tim Robinson, the retired chief polygraph operator for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, found that Curtis was indeed found to be truthful in all of his responses.

On February 13th, 2006, Clint Curtis declared his candidacy for the U.S. House of Representatives in Florida's 24th District.

Mr. Feeney, BTW, refuses to take a lie detector test himself ...

Full index of Brad Blog posts about Clint here.

TO BE CONTINUED