Clint Curtis: Too Good To Be True?

The Clint (or is it Clinton?) Curtis story that broke on BradBlog yesterday is making ripples in the blogosphere pond today, with most educated bloggers taking a sceptical line. Curtis claims to have written a vote-rigging program for a Florida company called Wong Enterprises. He further alleges that a Florida GOP Congressman, Tom Feeney, frequently attended meetings to direct the development of the software. Here's a link to Curtis' flyonthewall website.

Bev Harris at Black Box Voting has a long, hard look at the story and comes up with a bunch of questions. The most compelling of these, it seems to me, is Custis' claim to have filed a "QUITAM" whistleblower suit, that is "pending."

First, he doesn't spell it correctly. The correct spelling is two words, "Qui Tam." Next, Qui Tam cases MUST be filed under seal. If a Qui Tam is filed in Florida, both the evidence and the existence of the case must be sealed, and only the Florida Attorney General can unseal it...

You cannot keep the unsealing of a Qui Tam case away from the press. The press has mentioned no such Qui Tam in Florida.

This leaves two possibilities: (1) He filed the Qui Tam and is violating the court order to keep the case under seal, or (2) There is no Qui Tam case on this.

One of the problems for Bev is that Curtis' story was picked up quickly by Wayne Madsen, whose journalistic integrity (or lack of it) was recently savaged by Keith Olbermann, who himself had a recent run-in with Bev Harris over her refusal to appear on his Countdown TV show (unfortunately, it's a very small and stressful world in the Vote Fraud Blogosphere right now, and tempers are fraying!).

Curtis has now distanced himself from Madsen's analysis and asks that his story be judged on its own merits. And mind you, nobody is actually calling the story a hoax just yet. It could well be true. But after watching Dan Rather's reputation go down in flames when he was fed false evidence of Bush's AWOL memos, nobody important is tying their flag to this story just yet.

Blogs like Nero Fiddled and Lefterer are keeping track of this. Nero says William Pitt of truthout.org will be interviewing Clint Curtis in Washington on Wednesday. He also provides this photo of Feeney and Bush from Feeney's House of Reps web page.