Less than two months after he was elected in 2002, Norm Coleman used the power of his yet-to-be-assumed U.S. Senate office to try to leverage a presidential pardon for convicted money launderer and Tom Petters associate Frank Vennes Jr. And two years after that, Coleman wrote yet another pardon plea on Vennes’ behalf.
The fallout from her Hardball appearance may have grabbed all the headlines, but that’s hardly the only crisis that Michele Bachmann has been dealing with this month. There is also the matter of her ties to Frank Vennes Jr., the ex-con and Bachmann campaign contributor on whose behalf she wrote a letter requesting a presidential pardon.
Bachmann later withdrew that request — and gave to charity some campaign funds she had received from Vennes. But as it turns out, it appears that Bachmann donated the money to Minnesota Teen Challenge, a faith-based evangelical recovery program on whose board of directors Vennes served as recently as February 2008.
While Michele Bachmann has been calling on the media to investigate suspected “anti-American” members of Congress and who they associate with, she’s had little to say about her own personal and financial association with convicted felon, campaign contributor and Tom Petters associate Frank Vennes Jr.
Bachmann has refused repeated requests from Minnesota Independent for further clarification of her relationship with Vennes, which makes for a curious nexus of campaign financing, presidential pardons, evangelical ministries and multibillion-dollar Ponzi schemes.
In full-on damage control mode, Michele Bachmann sat down with WCCO’s Esme Murphy Sunday for an interview about the media firestorm occasioned by her claim on Hardball Friday that Barack…
It’s still not clear why Michele Bachmann used her congressional status to try to leverage a presidential pardon for someone who does not even live in her district. At this point, the only apparent connection between Frank Vennes Jr. and Bachmann as a congressperson is the $27,400 Vennes and his wife, Kimberly, have donated to Bachmann’s campaign funds since 2005, making the couple among Bachmann’s largest individual contributors. Vennes’ brother and his wife, Greg and Stephanie Vennes, have donated an additional $8,400 to Bachmann since 2005.
Read the letter, inside.
Frank Vennes Jr., a major financial contributor to Minnesota 6th District Congresswoman Michele Bachmann — as well as other Minnesota Republican candidates and causes — may be innocent until proven guilty, but Bachmann has already convicted him and thrown him under the campaign bus.
Barely a week after Vennes’ home was raided on Sept. 24 by federal agents in connection with the massive, billion-dollar fraud investigation of Tom Petters, the Stillwater Republican withdrew a letter of support for a Presidential pardon she had written for Vennes about a year ago.
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