The main reason: Under Minnesota law, he can’t.

Gary Goldsmith, executive director of the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board, tells the Minnesota Independent:

Minnesota Statutes Section 10A.27, subd. 9(c) prohibits a state candidate from accepting any contribution from a federal candidate’s committee.  This would prohibit transfer of any candidate’s federal committee funds to the a state office committee of the same candidate.

Even if such transfers were allowed, they couldn’t come from the campaign committee Coleman formed to take his recount showdown with Franken to Minnesota courts. Coleman terminated his recount committee last fall, according to the Federal Elections Commission (FEC).

The only federal Coleman committee that is current in FEC records is “Coleman for Senate 08.” That committee last filed a financial report in October, when it had $91,621 on hand. (The FEC found donor information in the October report to be lacking; the campaign has until next Tuesday to send in complete info.)

Coleman for Senate 08 got nearly $6,000, and the Republican Party of Minnesota nearly $30,000, from the Coleman Minnesota Recount Committee in its last days of operation last September.

Update: Coleman announced on Jan. 17 that he won’t be entering the governor’s race in 2010.

Two Supreme Court justices who served on the State Canvassing Board will recuse themselves, the Minnesota Independent reported last week, but a court spokesman tells MnIndy this morning that word of any further recusals won’t come until the high court accepts an appeal and lays out ground rules in an initial order.

News of Dietzen’s donations came from the blog Down With Tyranny on Saturday and was picked up Monday morning by the blogger Senate Guru, who last week posted an analysis of the Minnesota Supreme Court justices’ political background.

The two judges who served on the State Canvassing Board during the Franken-Coleman recount in late 2008 and early 2009 are Chief Justice Eric Magnuson and Associate Justice G. Barry Anderson. Because of the roles they played in the recount, neither participated in previous court decisions, and they won’t take part in any future cases related to the recount.

But Dietzen has not recused himself on earlier Coleman-Franken decisions. Court spokesman Kyle Christophersen said that unless individual justices take the unusual step of making their plans for recusal public in advance of deliberations, the world learns about recusals only after the court releases its first order in a case — and even then, it’s ordinarily without explanation.

The three-judge panel that heard Coleman’s contest of Franken’s recount win in the 2008 U.S. Senate race is expected to issue its final order at any time. Coleman has promised to appeal that decision, assuming it leaves Franken’s margin of victory intact, to the state Supreme Court.

A recusal by Dietzen would leave only four of the seven-person high court to decide whether Coleman’s complaints about the election, recount and election contest trial have legal merit.

Dietzen joined the state Court of Appeals in December 2004 — the same year but 11 months after his last political donation to Coleman — and was named to the state’s high court in November 2007. Gov. Tim Pawlenty, whose campaign Dietzen served as a lawyer in 2002, appointed Dietzen to both posts.

Here is the Federal Election Commission’s record of Dietzen’s latest two political contributions, both to Coleman. (For a pdf of the full FEC records showing nearly $4,000 in Dietzen donations between 2001and 2004, click here.)