More Trouble For Coleman: Latest Lawsuit Upends His First Defense
A second lawsuit has been filed against Nasser Kazeminy, Norm Coleman's longtime friend and financial adviser, again alleging that the Minnesota financier steered $75,000 to the Senator's family.
This suit, like the first, charges that the money was funneled to the Colemans through the insurance company that employs the Senator's wife. Only this time, a new accusation is leveled, one that could upend much of the defense that Coleman has deployed: the money was meant not for Laurie Coleman, but rather -- at least originally -- for the Senator himself.
Indeed, according to the second lawsuit, Kazeminy at first demanded that executives at Deep Marine Technology, a company he controlled, pay $75,000 to the Senator to help with his family's financial situation.
"Our clients were advised that Mr. Kazeminy first sought to have DMT make quarterly cash payments of $25,000 to Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota," writes plaintiff's attorney Anthony Paduano, citing a "confidential" informant.
If this is true -- and Glenn Thrush, the Politico reporter who first broke the story, aptly called it "breathtakingly stupid" -- it complicates things for Coleman both legally and politically.
After allegations first emerged, days before the election, Coleman called the issue an out-of-bounds political attack against his wife. And he turned attack on its head, framing it as a referendum on the conduct of his opponent, Al Franken, even though the paper that broke the story denied any involvement from the Democratic challenger.
"What he doesn't get is that when you take the candidate's wife and you put a commercial up ... defaming my wife?" Coleman said in the last debate between the Minnesota Senate candidates. "She has a right to earn a living, she has a right to live a life. Al, maybe you just don't know that there are lines that you don't cross. Maybe that's your career of not knowing there are lines that you don't cross."
Coleman even put out an advertisement accusing Franken of being "as dirty as it gets," in going after his wife.
"Al Franken's 11th hour attack: phony accusations filled with lies, delivered anonymously to a Minnesota paper, before being filed in a Texas court," goes the script. "The vicious personal attack on my wife, this time Al Franken has crossed the line. My name is on the ballot. I'm fair game for his ugly smears. My wife and family are not."
The premise of Coleman's challenge has been that Laurie Coleman had simply been paid for services she rendered as an employer of Hays Company, a Minnesota-based insurance firm where DMT's money was reportedly funneled. As such, any accusation that money was illegally laundered through her was an attack on his wife.
But if the allegations in the second lawsuit are true and Coleman himself was originally designated as a recipient of the $75,000, then by the Senator's own admission the issue is in-bounds.
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First Posted: 11-10-08 05:54 PM | Updated: 12-11-08 05:12 AM