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WASHINGTON — Nevada voters may have heard the sound of bells tolling for Majority Leader Harry Reid yesterday, and they weren’t coming from a quickie Vegas wedding chapel.
Reid’s bid to hold on to his Senate seat was rocked by revelations that one of his staffers had engaged in a sham marriage with a Lebanese immigrant trying to stay in the United States.
Fox News reported that the Reid aide, Diana Tejada, lied to the FBI and submitted fake documents allegedly to cover up her marriage to Lebanese national Bassam Mahmoud Tarhini.
Tejada, who served in Reid’s press operation and did outreach to the Hispanic community for Democrats, admitted to fraudulently marrying Tarhini in 2003 in exchange for payment from him to cover “some of her expenses,” according to court documents cited in the report.
Tarhini got permanent residency out of the marriage. The feds deported him in March. Tejada, now 28, was never charged.
The alleged fraud occurred years before Reid hired Tejada, and ordinarily might not pose too much of a problem.
But Reid is in the fight of his life to fend off Tea Party-backed Sharron Angle in one of the hardest-fought Senate races of the year.
An Angle TV ad slams Reid for “voting to give illegal aliens Social Security benefits, tax breaks and college tuition.”
The case was investigated by a Joint Terrorism Task Force in Oklahoma City, then got prosecuted in Oklahoma, where the fake marriage occurred.
“Our office was not previously aware of these allegations and, following an internal investigation, the staffer at issue is no longer with our office,” said Reid spokesman Jim Manley.
“The conduct alleged, which took place several years before the staffer worked for Senator Reid, was clearly wrong,” Manley said, calling the revelation a “desperation measure by partisan Republicans against “junior staffers.”
Reid is counting on a big turnout from Hispanic voters and union households to counter Angle’s conservative push.
Angle leads Reid by 4 percentage points in the latest Rasmussen poll, and leads him by a single point in the Real Clear Politics average of the latest polling.
The race is one of the hottest in the country, both for its symbolism and because it is one of a handful of toss-ups that will determine whether Republicans can take over the Senate.
In other campaign news:
* In Kentucky, Republican Rand Paul hit 50 percent in the latest Rasmussen poll, and now leads state Attorney General Jack Conway by 7 points.
* Also in Kentucky, Lauren Valle, a worker for the liberal group MoveOn.org, was assaulted by Paul supporters. Her blond wig was pulled off, she was dragged to the ground and her head was stomped on after she tried to give Paul a fake “employee of the month” award from the made-up company Republicorp.
The alleged stomper, Tim Profitt, a volunteer for Paul, was dropped by the campaign and apologized, but could face criminal charges. The incident was caught on video.
* Democrats were buoyed by a new Suffolk University poll that gave Sen. Barbara Boxer a 9 point lead over Carly Fiorina in California. Fiorina, meanwhile, was hospitalized for an infection caused by her breast-cancer surgery last summer.