Without addressing the continuing scandal surrounding his sweetheart rental arrangement in Washington D.C., Norm Coleman's reelection campaign has taken time this week to attack DFL opponent Al Franken -- twice! -- about petroleum-related issues.
Curious that the campaign and its bosses in DC would think this is a good tack to take -- since federal oil policy is set by the White House, does Team Coleman really want to put itself in line to be bound inextricably to George W. Bush's eight-year failure on energy issues?
Meanwhile, DFL Chair Brian Melendez was taking time to ask some serious questions about Coleman's rental deal with Republican political professional Jeff Larson:
"Senator Coleman, can you prove that you are paying fair market value? What research are you using to back up your claim that you are?"
"Coleman's claim that he has access only to his bedroom is simply not credible. In yesterday's National Journal article, Senator Coleman admitted again that he 'shares' the 'living space' with an office - namely the office of FLS-Connect, Jeff Larson's company. And we know from the real-estate listing not only that Coleman's bedroom is 'airy,' but that the basement includes many amenities that Coleman refuses to acknowledge.
"Are we to believe that when Coleman is in the apartment long after the FLS-Connect employee has left, he does not enjoy full use of the rest of the apartment? Why won't Senator Coleman admit that he has full access to the entire apartment?"
Is Senator Coleman paying his share of the utilities and, if so, can he prove it with a bill from Pepco [the utility company], or proof of payment to Pepco? If he is not paying his share, who is paying it for him - and would that subsidy constitute yet another ethics violation?"
...
"Why hasn't Senator Coleman produced a copy of his lease with Jeff Larson, along with any other related written documentation?"
"Senator Coleman, is it fair, when so many Minnesotans are worried about keeping their homes, are facing foreclosure or have been foreclosed on, that you get a cut-rate sweetheart deal from Jeff Larson, one of the most well-connected political operatives in America?"
To say nothing of Coleman's incredible persuasive ability to pay a month's rent with furniture that he then gets to use indefinitely in the space he's renting. I wish I could have pulled that one off in college.
It's a matter of ethics in government, and this one simply does not pass the smell test.
Now it's a wait-and-see game over the holiday weekend with Senator Barbara Boxer, D-CA, and the rest of the Senate Select Committee on Ethics to see if they decide to investigate this matter.
As much attention as the Laurie Coleman "I'm a true family man, see?" ad got, the National Journal story is so much worse. As bad as Adgate was in terms of giving a false image of Coleman's personal life, the pieces of the NJ story present potential violations of the spirit, if not the letter, of the law.
Let's review:
K-Street Fixer provides lodging Senator lodging for what has to be less than fair market value.
Senator misses a few payments, but it's okay, because K-Street Fixer/Landlord is cool with it.
Senator pays K-Street Fixer/Landlord for missed rent after National Journal asks about it.
Senator also pays K-Street Fixer/Landlord for at least one month's rent in furniture. This may be because Senator does not currently indicate ownership of a checking account, which leads Senator's wife to write rent checks for him. But seriously? Furniture?
Senator also pays K-Street Fixer/Landlord's wife for constituent casework under her maiden name.
Senator pays K-Street Fixer/Landlord's consulting firm more than a million dollars over the course of his first term for campaign-related work.
K-Street Fixer/Landlord's close associates donate to Senator's campaign, money which ends up, in part, back in K-Street Fixer/Landlord's pocket for Lobbyist/Landlord's political consulting work for Senator.
How can there not be some kind of official inquiry into these questionable relationships coming, and soon? Was Dorene Kainz qualified to do constituent casework for Minnesotans due to her work as a homemaker from Wisconsin (according to her stated profession on numerous donations to Republican candidates including one Coleman, Norm (R)? Maybe she had plenty of experience in constituent services earlier in her career and then quit to become a homemaker, and that'd be fine. But she's still the wife of a Washington political operator with some seriously questionable business interactions with a sitting United States Senator. It begs an inquiry, at very least.
As with so many stories in this election cycle, the local media bears watching as well: when the National Journal story broke, the Pioneer Press had a story up quickly, but where was the Star-Tribune? Right now, the Strib's most recent website headline that mentions Coleman is about the most recent poll showing Barack Obama and Coleman ahead in their respective races. That's all well and good, it's just stale like old bread. If a story about a potentially really bad situation for a sitting U.S. Senator is good enough for the rest of the traditional media in the Twin Cities (such as it is) is it not good enough, newsworthy enough for the Star-Tribune?
So it's going to be a bad week for Coleman -- mark my words. But it should be a bad week for the Star-Tribune leadership as well: for a newspaper that's supposed to be the leading source of news in the Twin Cities, it sure seems like they're dropping the ball at Strib HQ when it comes to determining what constitutes "important news."
I do like the Gardening section, though. Good info in there. Timely. Important.
**Update**: Changed "Lobbyist" to "K-Street Fixer, since, as an eagle-eyed reader noticed, Larson is not a federally registered lobbyist.
The National Journal is taking a look at the increasingly tight appearance of the relationship between Norm Coleman and his lobbyists.
Those lobbyists are the ones that run his campaign and are tight with the brutal military regime in Myanmar.
Good stuff - check it out:
Most curiously, Larson provides Coleman with a place to live in Washington. In July 2007, Coleman began paying Larson $600 a month in rent for a portion of a one-bedroom basement apartment in a Capitol Hill town house that Larson owns. The way Coleman explained the arrangement, the apartment serves as a crash pad. The 58-year-old senator sleeps in a bed shoehorned into a 10-by-10 bedroom, and he said he spends perhaps only "three waking hours a night" in the place.
Earlier this month, after National Journal questioned Coleman and Larson about the living arrangement, the senator said he discovered that his rent for last November and January had not been paid. In mid-June, Coleman covered the back rent with a personal check for $1,200 made out to Larson and signed by the senator's wife. Last year, Coleman sold furniture to Larson to cover one month's rent, according to Larson. And Larson held on to yet another month's rent check for three months, cashing it a few days after NJ's inquiries.
Larson's St. Paul-based company, FLS Connect, is a critical component of Coleman's political operation. The firm, which has raised money and hustled up voters for Coleman, has been paid about $1.6 million since mid-2001 by Coleman's Northstar Leadership political action committee and two Senate campaigns, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. Larson serves as the PAC's treasurer and provides it with office space in St. Paul; Coleman's Senate campaign stopped renting space from Larson last year.
Larson is the L in FLS, which is still closely linked to the disgraced lobbying firm DCI, which also had some funny little links to the campaign of presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain.
But this is more than just the same old culture of corruption we've come to expect from the modern Republican Party -- Norm Coleman is paying rent with furniture, his wife is writing his checks (since Coleman himself doesn't appear to have listed a checking account on his personal financial disclosure), and the 10x10 D.C. bachelor pad he's renting is owned by the same lobbyist who he pays for political consulting and whose colleagues donate to Coleman's campaign....it's a dizzying array of disingenuous conduct.
Is it a campaign issue, per se? Only if you believe that Washington lobbyists have a bit too much influence already with our elected leaders. One need only look as far as the debacle of a FISA bill that's making its way through the Senate to understand how powerful the lobbyists who control the easy money in Washington really are.
Add Larson and the rest of his FLS/DCI buddies to the list of people Norm Coleman would do well to remove from his company.
Way back in May 2007 I noted that Norm Coleman was paying an obscene amount of money to a consulting firm called FLS Connect. More recently, it turned out that a related entity, DCI, is firmly ensconced with the lobbying efforts of a brutal military regime in Myanmar, a fact which caused presumptive Republican nominee John McCain to eliminate his links to the organization. It was also noted that DCI leaders had made several large-dollar donations to Coleman's reelection campaign, which he's refused to give up. Curious.
So here we are at the end of May, and the DFL has assembled a nice set of researched facts on the relationship (it really can't be left at "links" anymore) between Coleman and DCI. It breaks down like this:
Coleman's campaign and PAC pay FLSConnect and FLS-DCI fat stacks of cash.
DCI lobbyists donate to Coleman's campaign.
Leading DCI figures like Jeff Larson find their way into Coleman's inner political advisory circle.
DCI lobbying clients like AT&T and the National Pork Producers Council give PAC donations to Coleman's reelection committee
Coleman votes the donors' line on important legislation like the Internet Tax Ban Bill, Country-of-Origin-Labelling standards, against increasing CAFE gas mileage standards, and against reimportation of cheaper Canadian drugs
In stark contrast to the breathless dreck you'll find on any number of human Republican bullhorns' websites these days about NRSC attack videos and contorted half-truths, these are pretty hard facts that Coleman isn't addressing
This new information makes it nearly impossible to figure out where Norm Coleman ends and the well-connected lobbyists and special interests - that always seem to get their way with him - begin ... They don't just fund his political campaigns; they are his core political operation. Call it Coleman's $1.5 million shuffle: Norm Coleman shuffles campaign money between FLS-DCI and the DCI Group and, at the same time, takes votes that benefit their clients. They win. He wins. Minnesotans lose." -- DFL Chair Brian Melendez
Canned statements are usually just political fluff, but this is a pretty serious matter -- are Coleman's votes following money that's brought in by the same lobbyists that are running his campaign? Is his campaign made up of the same lobbyists that have brought countless thousands of dollars in the Myanmar junta's blood money into Washington?
Five million inquiring Minnesotan minds need to know. Now.
Norm Coleman employs the services of a consulting firm linked pretty directly to the brutal military regime in Myanmar, and we're supposed to care that Al Franken wrote a column 8 YEARS AGO for a magazine that contains pictures of naked ladies?
The breathless pearl-clutching from the Republican mouthpieces on the internet is stunning here.
Seriously, which is worse? Naked ladies, or brutal military dictators who steal post-cyclone humanitarian aid from their own people?
As an aside, who among us wouldn't mind the exposure that would come from getting a column published in Playboy? I know more than one person who's been published in Hugh Hefner's flagship, and they're pretty universally happy with the results that come from it.
So drop me a line when Al Franken writes something graphic as a U.S. Senate candidate. I doubt the Republican noise machine would appreciate us bringing up Norm Coleman's past as a pot-smoking student leader who dissed conservative bobby-soxers because "they don't get high like us, they don't fuck like us..."
Oops, I'm sorry, was there a line back there? I missed it in the commotion over a Playboy article.
One of the primary firms serving Norm Coleman's reelection campaign is FLS Connect -- I wrote about them some time ago. They share an address in St. Paul with Coleman's campaign, and have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees from Coleman's coffers.
FLS is closely linked with DCI, the same firm that's involved with the Myanmar junta.
Yep, that's right -- FLSConnect.com is registered to an entity called "FLS-DCI" located in Oakdale, MN. Sourcewatch indicates that those first three letters stand for "Feather Larson Synhorst" -- Synhorst refers to the chairman of DCI, Thomas Synhorst, and Sourcewatch notes one of their specialties: "creating phony front groups to make it appear as if there's a groundswell of support for its clients' issues."
Really now.
So, it's no small wonder that Norm Coleman doesn't want to return that money. One has to wonder how many cookie jars in which we're going to find these guys' hands.
What's Norm Coleman's response to calls for the return of donations from a lobbying firm connected to the brutal military regime in Myanmar?
No explanation of Coleman's meetings or discussions with the firm's leading figures. No details on Coleman's position on the Myanmar junta.
No, Coleman's response is to try to turn attention to an issue at Air America Radio, where his likely DFL opponent Al Franken used to work.
Human rights organizations and dissident groups have bitterly accused the junta of neglecting disaster victims and blocking foreign donations of relief supplies following the May 3 cyclone. The United Nations estimates the death toll could be between 62,000 and 100,000.
Justice Department records show DCI signed a contract to work to "improve relations between the United States and Myanmar" and to act as the junta's public relations agent in Washington.
In a statement, Coleman campaign spokesman Tom Erickson referenced an improper $875,000 transfer from the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club in New York City to the liberal radio network Air America when Franken was a star host there. That transfer prompted a probe by the city's Department of Investigation.
"Franken continues to remain silent about his role in this matter," Erickson said. "As for returning a legal contribution from an individual and company engaged in legal activities, of course we will not be returning the contribution."
Or, in classic form, they're not saying DCI isn't doing work on behalf of terrible people, and they're not saying that the money given to the campaign by DCI figures didn't come from the Myanmar junta in the form of lobbying fees...they're just saying that the Boys and Girls Club is just about the same as a repressive military regime.
Shame. Coleman's campaign team probably could have made this go away by just returning the check or donating it to recovery efforts. Now, not so much.
Based on some of the donations he's received from some of the leading figures of a lobbying firm that's worked with the brutally repressive regime in the country formerly known as Burma, who knows?
According to FEC records, Coleman took $1,000 from Goodyear himself; $1,000 from Angela Flood, DCI Group vice-president; and $2,000 from Justin Peterson, a DCI Group managing partner. Coleman's campaign received another $2,000 from the DCI Group Political Action Committee.
The DFL was kind enough to press Coleman to return the funds received from these figures:
"Senator Coleman should rid himself of tainted contributions from DCI, a lobbying firm that has represented an oppressive regime that is denying vital assistance to its own people during a time of crisis."
"For the sake of transparency, Senator Coleman needs to be fully open about his relationship with the DCI Group," continued Melendez. "How often has he met with them? What did they discuss? On whose behalf has the DCI Group lobbied him, and have they ever lobbied him on behalf of the military junta in Myanmar? What has the DCI Group asked of him, and when?"
Melendez brings up some good questions here, and they're questions for which I seriously doubt the answers will be quickly forthcoming from the Republican Party or its minions.
On the other hand, can't you imagine the dozens and dozens of CAPITALIZED HEADLINES OMG their minions would produce if the tables were turned and it were Al Franken getting donations from people who'd worked for a repressive, backward, military regime in a third-world country?
How about it, Mr. Coleman? For what were these donations the price of admission? What exactly did DCI's representatives discuss with you? When? How often?
