For Carly Fiorina there are new battles to be waged and the most immediate fight surrounds the question of whether she did, or did not know about the Hewlett-Packard printers sold to Iran while she was the CEO of the company; there is no question that the transactions did take place.

Once you get past the issue of Carly Firoina’s very vague voting record you hit the first major snafu surrounding her tenure as HP’s CEO, and her desire to unseat Barbra Boxer in Washington DC. What about the printers Carly?

During the past dozen or so years, HP has been selling printers to Iran through a distributor.

All the while, Iran has been listed on a US trade embargo due to the countries determination to pursue nuclear weapons and its heavy-handed crackdown on government dissidents.

Now the individual who was at the helm of HP for much of that time, Carly Fiorina, wants to be California’s replacement of Barbara Boxer for US Senate, and the questions – best described as accusations are starting to fly.

What did Carly know about this distributor, and if she knew, what did she do – if anything – to start the illegal sidestepping of US law?

The better question might be, what if she knew nothing at all of of the sales and sidestepping? Is that possible, and will it fly for the voters of California?

Fiorina was the CEO of HP for six years; 1999 to 2005. It was during that time that HP’s growth in Iran grew through two regional distributors, one a Middle East distributor and the other a European distributor.

Although the distributors are separate from HP in operations, there is still the availability for leverage; if HP knew that these distributors were selling to Iran they could have added pressure to encourage them to cease. The issue is whether HP cared enough to find out.

There is also no question that the Middle East was a region of determine growth for HP under Fiorina’s tutelage.

The San Jose Mercury News reported earlier this year, “in 1999, after she (Fiorina) took over at HP, the company’s Middle East general manager was quoted in a United Arab Emirates English-language newspaper calling Iran ‘a big market for Hewlett-Packard printers’ and noting sales growth in the country was 50-percent.”

In 2003, Fiorina commented that the Middle East was a region of great growth for the company; and during the same year, Redington Gulf (the distributor) claimed in a press release that HP sales of printers was topping out at nearly $100 million.

The question is not whether HP sold printers to Iran through regional distributors, it seems to be whether the HP CEO had the knowledge that it was taking place. Which leads those critical of Carly Firoina to ask, “How can the CEO not know if her company is violating a US Trade Embargo?”

Was Carly simply a weak CEO, or was she an ignored CEO at HP, with many offering insubordination as they worked around her office with personal agendas and sour sediments?

After spending some time reading of Fiornia’s corporate memoirs during a 12-hour flight to Hong Kong recently, this printer accusation may rest with Carly’s continual reference to Hewlett-Packard’s animosity towards her as the companies historic CEO, and the fact that she had to deal with what she called “a thousand tribes” within HP management structure.

In reading Firorina’s book called, “Tough Choices”, Carly pens, “My father was teaching the new Ghanaian constitution to law students. Ghana in 1969 was experimenting with democracy after the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah. I listened to great debates at our dinner table when my father’s Ghanain students would visit. I saw how difficult building a nation was when smaller but more powerful tribal loyalties conflicted with the larger but more abstract idea of a nation. Much later, at HP, I would recall the experience and coin the phrase “a thousand tribes” to describe the intense turf battles waged between executives and their divisions at the expense of the company.”

Fiorina makes numerous claims that her service at HP was as much about a woman gaining the confidence and respect from the company as it was about a CEO determined to change the way business inside of corporate USA was to be done; with loyalty, great ethic and respect for people as much as the bottom line.

This ideal rubbed a few ‘higher-ups’ the wrong way, and it may have been one of the reasons that many HP insiders to this day claim that Fiorina was a great success and great failure at the same time.

I spoke with Fiorina spokesperson Beth Miller this week and asked her about Carly’s response to the Iran printer sales.

Miller reported that, “when I mentioned this to Carly she was shocked, upset and totally caught off-guard. Selling printers to Iran is illegal, and Carly had no knowledge of a concerned effort to sell printers to Iran under her watch as CEO of Hewlett-Packard.”

For a woman who was groomed to be an intelligent educator like her father, she chose a different path – that being business and corporate America. For Carly it created fame, but to her dismay it may have also placed a target on her back at the same time.

Did fellow members at HP consider her a showcase CEO, working around her instead of with her?

Did subordinate HP divisionsal managers sell printers directly to Iran without its CEO knowing as much? And if so, one then reads the “thousand tribes” comment in her book as a brief glimpse into a CEO office that may have been more consumed with ‘hurding sensative corporate cats’ than gathering direction from sincere profit margin evaluations.

Know this, Carly Fiorina is a lightening rod of discussion when you speak with people at HP. They either really like her, or they really dislike her; there isn’t much middle ground. And for the campaign ahead there may be more stories of management decisions made that never crossed the desk of CEO Carly.

She was a trailblazer, a woman ahead of her time in more ways than one.

Now her political future may rest with the ring-leaders of those “thousand tribes”; whether or not there are more arrows to come from those who never had the courage to work with a (woman) strong-willed CEO face-to-face in the past.

As Fiorina’s campaign ramps up the campaign staff better be ready for what rests behind door number two, for her new opponents will go to great lengths to recruit those HP tribal leaders.

Failing to plan is a sure plan for failure. There will be more Carly charges to come – the bigger question will have more to do with her stamina than those printers; can she navigate the rough waters of the unforgiving political arena as she did climbing the ladder inside of those cold corporate boardrooms?

One thing is for certain, she is already battle tested.