Coleman (WDCPix), Palin

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin did something Friday that former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman has not: She set up her own legal defense fund.
Palin will use contributions to her new fund to fight off ethics complaints.

Coleman’s stated quest to use campaign money to pay his own legal bills has itself generated ethics complaints, most recently last week.

Coleman has mysteriously failed to follow through on a vow to ask the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) to okay his plan to spend campaign money on lawyers and investigators for work on civil suits filed in Texas and Delaware.

The suits allege that Coleman friend and benefactor Nasser Kazeminy ordered a Texas company he controlled to pay the St. Paul insurance firm where Coleman’s wife works $100,000 (of which $75,000 was actually transferred).

One key difference: Coleman is not a defendant in the lawsuits — although he is named in the complaints stemming from them.

In another move Friday, Palin announced that her political action committee, SarahPAC, has parted ways with Campaign Solutions, a firm founded by high-profile GOP fundraiser Becki Donatelli.

That’s also a step Coleman didn’t take with his 2008 Senate campaign: FEC filings show Coleman made payments to Campaign Solutions (pdf) and its eDonation online fundraising service (pdf) going back at least to 2007 (pdf) and as recently as March 25 this year (pdf).

Coleman’s separate recount committee hasn’t reported disbursements of its own to Campaign Solutions or eDonation. But that committee did continue to pay “e-merchant fees” to a different outfit, Campaign Financial Services, even after the scandal in which his campaign Web site leaked donors’ private financial information.