strib-still-norm-suvTwo Star Tribune reporters have answered the charges former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman made yesterday against them. Coleman told WCCO-TV the reporters ambushed him last October with questions about alleged money funneling and implied they intended to deliver a performance before partisan cameras that would provide footage for an eleventh-hour attack ad.

Paul McEnroe and Tony Kennedy said today they had sought an interview with Coleman for days and warned his campaign that without one they’d have to raise the issue at an Oct. 29 campaign event. And the record shows that by that time local reporters had been trying to get answers from Coleman for at least three weeks.

“They knew the cameras were there,” Coleman told WCCO-TV on Sunday. “They could have gone back and had a quiet conversation if that was the purpose. My point being they appeared in a Democratic Party ad four days before an election on something that never happened.”

The public showdown (video) wasn’t the reporters’ first try or their first choice, they said. “We made every attempt to have a ‘conversation,’ as the senator put it, but we were continually stonewalled by his staff in the days prior to our attempt to talk to him during his campaign stop in St. Cloud,” McEnroe and Kennedy told Braublog.

In fact, Coleman was already griping about reporters’ questions on the topic and stonewalling them three weeks before Kennedy and McEnroe made their stand in St. Cloud, as Steve Perry explained in a Minnesota Independent post last November:

On October 10, Norm Coleman volunteered on the record that “Over the last several days I have received a fresh batch of questions from reporters, fueled by blogs, about personal issues concerning… my wife.” … 

At an October 8 press conference (here’s a Publius post with transcript) that’s been widely viewed on YouTube — the one in which Coleman rep Cullen Sheehan repeated the same boilerplate response about whether Nasser Kazeminy bought suits for Norm Coleman — Rachel Stassen-Berger of the Pioneer Press asks Coleman about his wife’s job at Hays Companies.

And speaking (as Coleman did on Sunday) of ads that run “four days before an election on something that never happened,” it’s worth noting that the former senator no longer talks about the charges he leveled against Franken in his own last-minute campaign ad (hat tip to commenter lenzy1000 at The UpTake’s live chat):

Al Franken’s eleventh-hour attack, phony accusations filled with lies delivered anonymously to a Minnesota paper before being filed in a Texas court, the vicious personal attack on my wife. This time Al Franken’s crossed the line. My name’s on the ballot. I’m fair game for his smears. My wife and family are not. In Minnesota this is as dirty as it gets. I’m Norm Coleman. I approved this message because there’s got to be a better way.

Coleman saw fit to make that accusation against Franken at the eleventh hour before the election. But now, at the whatever-hour of the election contest, reporters have become his target.