Legally and politically, it’s a perfectly legitimate move to ensure that every vote is counted, but Team Franken stepped into a PR nightmare by embellishing the news of their lawsuit with the high-pathos anecdotal case of an 84-year-old Beltrami County woman whose ballot was rejected because a stroke had altered her signature. (MnIndy’s Chris Steller has video of the campaign’s telling of the story.)

But then, Lopez writes, “Beltrami County Auditor Kay Mack… questioned the campaign’s account, saying her office hadn’t rejected any ballots because of mismatched signatures. Mack said there was one instance of an 87-year-old woman in an assisted living center whose ballot was rejected because it bore no signature or mark. The law, Mack said, is ‘very clear’ about not accepting such ballots.

“After being contacted by the Star Tribune with Mack’s account, Franken campaign spokesman Andy Barr said Thursday night that there may have been ’some confusion about our earlier field report,’ adding that the campaign is ’still digging into the facts.’ Barr said the issue does not affect the merits of their lawsuit.”

Strictly speaking, Barr is right. And since the election is likely to be decided in court ultimately, the collateral damage from embarrassments like these may prove to be minimal. But it’s hardly an encouraging sign that the Franken campaign is faltering in foreseeable, preventable ways in the court of public opinion, especially when the Coleman campaign is seizing every opportunity to cast public doubt on the whole process.

Norm and Laurie Coleman on the campaign trail earlier this fall (Paul Demko/Minnesota Independent)

UPDATED: [see below]

Yesterday a friend reminded me to look back to a Norm Coleman press conference held nearly a month ago, and in particular to some comments Coleman made about his wife and reporters that seemed opaque at the time. It turns out Coleman’s queries from reporters about his wife’s job didn’t spring up just a week ago, as he’s claimed.

The ostensible subject of the October 10 confab was Coleman’s announcement that, owing to a change of heart occasioned by Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, his campaign would no longer run negative advertising. (By purest chance, polls released just before Yom Kippur had indicated the ads were killing Coleman.) But Minnesota’s senior US senator also used the presser to try to tamp down the internet buzz about allegations that a friend and fundraiser named Nasser Kazeminy had bought clothes for Norm at Neiman-Marcus at some point in the past. The event was tightly controlled; as Paul Schmelzer wrote at the time, reporters from Minnesota Independent and The UpTake were not allowed inside to tape it.

Let’s look at some relevant excerpts of Coleman’s prepared remarks as released by the campaign at the time. (The full transcript is reproduced here.) I’ve added emphasis

My second decision was to make an appeal to basic fairness and respect when it comes to coverage of our personal lives.

Over the last several days I have received a fresh batch of questions from reporters, fueled by blogs, about personal issues concerning my finances, my family and my wife….

Families and personal issues are out of bounds and must stay that way. And, from this Senator and father and husband – they are off bounds – and out of bounds. In recent days, outrageous questions and insinuations have been lodged against my wife about her employment. My wife’s job has been disclosed as required under the ethics laws of the United States Senate. My wife is a certified and licensed insurance agent – she works for a living – and her employer is pleased with her work – and she is pleased with her job.

And that’s all anybody is entitled to know.

Questions about my wife – about my children – about their private lives, jobs, work and school – are just that – private. And, they will remain that way….

Let’s be clear about this: 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.” He later explained the subject of those questions: “In recent days, outrageous questions and insinuations have been lodged against my wife about her employment.”

In other words: Contrary to his claims to media on Friday and yesterday, when Coleman a) said that the media (specifically, the Star Tribune) first received information about the claims “last week,” and b) implied that this late, low blow could only have been the work of the Al Franken campaign, Coleman — by his own account — had been asked by reporters about these allegations sometime around the first week of October.

The fact Coleman knew what was coming much sooner than advertised sheds no light on the matter of Coleman’s likely innocence or guilt, but it sheds a lot of light on his claims of an 11th-hour Franken ambush in recent days — put plainly, his characterization of how this story came to light and what it probably means is false. Norm told us himself, on October 10, that reporters were asking after his wife’s job in early October. And he didn’t ascribe it to the Franken campaign. In fact, the outward purpose of that entire press conference was to call for an end to negative campaigning on both sides.

This revised time-frame also lends more credence to the blogosphere conjecture in recent days that Coleman’s own 11th-hour lawsuit against the Franken campaign, announced on this past Wednesday, was a preemptive gesture to wrest the news cycle away from news of that other lawsuit that Coleman had known was coming.

Which, we should note, worked like a charm:

I’ve been unable to find video of the press conference anywhere, though there are a couple of brief clips of Coleman’s remarks in this KSTP-TV report from that night.

UPDATE: After I published this item, I phoned Aaron Landry of MnPublius to ask for his help in tracking down a reference link I couldn’t locate. Instead he pointed me to something far more interesting and more germane: 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.

REPORTER: What about his, uh, Laurie, Mrs. Coleman’s job at Hays Company?  Do you know what she did there?

CULLEN SHEEHAN: Again, they have disclosed everything they need to disclose on the Senate ethics forms.

REPORTER: So the Senator will only go according to the Senate ethics laws, rather, rules rather than answer questions?

CULLEN SHEEHAN: He has done everything that he is required to do, Rachel.

And here’s the video.

The vast (and masochistic!) left-wing conspiracy

This morning’s news of a second lawsuit alleging the transmission of funds from Nasser Kazeminy to Norm Coleman poses serious complications for Coleman’s “they’re out to get me” defense. Coleman can and probably will claim that this is just further evidence of the vast left-wing conspiracy to do him in, but that seemed unlikely yesterday (“Five reasons to doubt it’s all just sleazy politics”) and seems exponentially more unlikely today.

For starters, the plaintiff in the first suit alleging improper payments to Coleman, Paul McKim, is a defendant in the second suit alleging improper payments to Coleman. When Coleman’s accusers start suing each other, it puts a serious dent in Norm’s case that they are all conspiring together to bring about his downfall.

Second, the filing of this second lawsuit buttresses McKim’s original claim that he filed the lawsuit not to harm Norm Coleman but in part to protect himself from the claims of angry investors in his company.

So, uh, how would Norm know when the Star Tribune learned about the lawsuit?

The most interesting passage in Coleman’s statement yesterday — and the linchpin of its implication that “Al Franken and his political allies” were involved somehow — was this one:

Let me tell you how this arose. This is not about public documents researched by an investigative reporter. No. Sometime last week, even before this Texas lawsuit was originally filed, a copy of false allegations were delivered in Minnesota in an unmarked envelope to two Minneapolis Star Tribune reporters. I want to repeat that: Sometime last week, even before this Texas lawsuit was originally filed, a copy of false allegations were delivered in Minnesota in an unmarked envelope to two Minneapolis Star Tribune reporters.

David Brauer at MinnPost talked to the Star Tribune’s deputy managing editor, Rene Sanchez, on Friday and asked whether the Strib had indeed received an advance copy of the lawsuit. Sanchez said no.

On the face of it, that would seem to suggest Coleman was making things up. Not necessarily so. Coleman didn’t say that the paper received the lawsuit (that is, the formal legal complaint) before it was filed; he said someone sent the paper “a copy of the allegations.” I have also heard the paper received an anonymous piece of mail prior to the filing of the suit, as I wrote yesterday, though I have not yet spoken to anyone who will confirm being the recipient.

There’s strong circumstantial reason to think the paper knew the lawsuit was coming. Consider first that it was filed on Monday in Texas. And by midday Wednesday, reporters Paul McEnroe and Tony Kennedy were at a Coleman campaign event in St. Cloud trying to ask Coleman about it. McEnroe was brandishing a copy of the legal complaint, which he and Kennedy had clearly read and digested by then.

I can attest that the lawsuit was impossible to find through Google or even the subscription legal database Pacer, because once Minnesota Independent had heard about it, Paul Demko and I spent a considerable amount of time looking for it. (The lawsuit and its accompanying exhibits are online, we learned later, but only through a registration-required database at the level of the Texas county court system.) Bottom line: You couldn’t have known it existed, much less found it, without knowing where to look.

So it appears the Strib did get a heads-up of some sort; the timeline affords no other conclusion that I can see. This question of who knew what when matters for one reason: How did Sen. Norm Coleman become privy to any information about what the Star Tribune had or hadn’t received?

It would be one thing if the reporters on the story chose to volunteer information like that in the course of working their sources in the Coleman camp. But that didn’t happen, according to one of the two reporters who have been on the story, Paul McEnroe. When I phoned McEnroe, he refused to discuss his sourcing but did say this: “Nobody sent an anonymous package to me or Tony. And Tony and I have never talked to anyone in the Coleman campaign about where we get our information. We have no idea what he based that statement on. If he cares to share it, we’d love to hear from him about it.”

Does the Coleman campaign have a special friend at the Star Tribune? And if so, who?

Why bury the lede when you can bury the whole story?

I haven’t seen the print edition of Saturday’s Star Tribune bearing the Paul McEnroe/Tony Kennedy story about lawsuit number two, but check out the packaging it got online:

See anything wrong with the packaging? Like, say, it’s completely misleading? The headline gives the reader no idea that a second lawsuit is afoot; it extracts a phrase from the denial that Norm Coleman offered before the story of the second lawsuit even broke. Thus a consequential story is packaged as if it only contains information that readers following the matter would presume they had already seen in Friday’s news cycle.

Why didn’t they just headline it “Nothing to see here, folks”?

A sixth reason to doubt that it’s all just “sleazy politics”

After I wrote the Five Reasons post yesterday, I realized I’d overlooked something obvious that militates against Norm Coleman’s position that he’s just an innocent victim here: his behavior when first asked about the lawsuit on Wednesday. Everyone following this story has seen by now the video of Star Tribune reporters trying in vain to interview Coleman through a closed SUV window (now part of an ad, as Chris Steller noted here today), but only Rachel Stassen-Berger of the Pioneer Press has noted what happened next (emphasis added):

Coleman’s [Wednesday campaign schedule] was diverted Wednesday after reporters questioned him during his St. Cloud stop about a lawsuit filed against Coleman contributor Nasser Kazeminy. Coleman walked out of the St. Cloud restaurant where he had just finished his stump speech and jumped into his SUV without answering questions.

Shortly thereafter, reporters traveling with Coleman got word from Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who had spent the past two days on the road with him, that the senator was canceling the rest of his Wednesday stops and heading back to the Twin Cities. Within an hour, Pawlenty called reporters to say Coleman would resume his campaign trip.

If there was a reasonable explanation, why was Coleman’s initial impulse to bunker down?

Two questions

If Coleman, and therefore also Nasser Kazeminy, are being baselessly slandered here, why is Kazeminy remaining silent?

And why isn’t anyone from Hays Companies addressing the matter of the Hays billing to plaintiff Paul McKim’s company, Deep Marine Technologies, that’s attached to the legal complaint? If there’s a legitimate explanation, now would be an exceptionally good time to proffer it.

Norm and Laurie Coleman at a campaign event earlier this year (Paul Demko/Minnesota Independent)

Norm Coleman stood before a gaggle of reporters and fans at what was supposed to be a routine campaign stop in Moorhead this morning and addressed the story that’s been chasing after him for the past few days. Allegations that Coleman pal Nasser Kazeminy had funneled money to Laurie Coleman for doing a non-existent job were “absolutely false,” Coleman said. But that was only the starting point of his remarks, which sought for the better part of five minutes to paint the whole affair as a fabrication wrought by “Al Franken and his political allies.”

Only the plaintiff, Paul McKim, can answer with certainty as to his timing and motives — and Coleman’s allegation that the Strib received copies of information by mail about the suit before it was filed (which is correct, according to sources there) casts doubt on the political innocence of the plaintiff’s team when it comes to the suit’s implications for Norm’s future. But that does not prove the Franken campaign had anything to do with it — unless you suppose that all the enemies Norm Coleman and/or Nasser Kazeminy have ever made now work in cahoots with the Franken campaign.

Ultimately, the question of whether politics played a role in the timing of the lawsuit has no bearing on the merit of the claims in the lawsuit. If people sometimes lie at an opportune moment for politicized reasons, as Coleman is suggesting, it is also the case that people sometimes tell the truth at an opportune moment for politicized reasons. And whatever its eventual disposition proves to be, there is considerable circumstantial evidence that this lawsuit was not merely ginned up to make Norm Coleman look bad on the eve of a hard-fought election. Let’s take the most obvious ones.

The lawsuit, contrary to the impression one might receive from Coleman’s response or from many of the press accounts, is not principally about the alleged payments to Laurie Coleman. The Kazeminy/Coleman narrative comprises roughly three pages of a 30-page legal complaint. Are we to believe the rest is all just incidental embroidery on a campaign to maliciously bring down Norm Coleman?

The complaint lodges numerous serious allegations about financial manipulations by Nasser Kazeminy and a number of his associates (there are six defendants in all). The plaintiff in the case, Paul McKim, would be facing serious legal jeopardy himself if those claims proved to be entirely baseless. (Counter-suit, anyone?)

The fact that the suit was temporarily withdrawn within a day or so while the parties negotiated toward a settlement augurs for a presumption that the claims in the suit were not entirely baseless — as does the immediacy with which the defendants took up settlement negotiations (within a matter of mere hours, apparently).

The PDF copy of the complaint posted at StarTribune.com includes photocopies of documents tracing payments from Deep Marine Technologies to Hays Companies (Laurie Coleman’s employer) as described in the complaint. [They're on pages 29-33 of this PDF.] Now it’s possible that these documents describe legitimate transactions. (The legal complaint claims that Hays is not licensed to be an insurance broker in Texas; Hays this morning denied that.) They could conceivably be forgeries. But again, the plaintiff would be subjecting himself to a world of legal hurt if he were to sue someone based on gross and blatant fabrications.

McKim, as Paul Demko and others have pointed out, appears to be a Republican judging by his campaign donations in the past. [See comments below.] By itself, this proves nothing — it’s possible to be a Republican and to have it out for one particular Republican — but it’s one more circumstantial factor that augurs against supposing McKim cooked up the whole thing in cahoots with the Democrats, as Coleman worked so fervently to suggest.

How does Strib placement of the breaking Coleman lawsuit story compare to other local MSM sites?

A commenter points out this morning that the print edition of the Star Tribune has relegated Paul McEnroe and Tony Kennedy’s story about the Texas lawsuit against Friend-of-Norm Nasser Kazeminy to a bottom corner of the metro section’s front page.

Placement means a lot in terms of readership — not only in print but on the web. So we decided to see how the Twin Cities’ mainstream news outlets are playing the story on their home pages. Web pages, like newspapers, have their own “above the fold” premium real estate for promoting important stories; roughly speaking, it’s the portion of the home page that one can see in a browser window without scrolling around.

Here are screen shots of that portion of local newspaper, public radio, and TV station sites with any reference to the Coleman and Kazeminy litigation highlighted in yellow. They were all taken around 10 a.m. CST this morning. In each case, you can click on the image for a larger view.

Star Tribune

Pioneer Press

Fox (Ch 9)

KARE 11

KSTP (Ch 5)

WCCO (Ch 4)

Minnesota Public Radio

“Sen. Norm Coleman is planning to make a statement on a lawsuit that claims his friend and donor funneled $75,000 to an insurance company that employs the senator’s wife.

“The Coleman re-election campaign has called the allegations ‘baseless and false,’ and ‘an 11th-hour attack.’ The senator’s statement was planned for 10 a.m. today in Moorhead.”

“We entered into serious settlement negotiations,” says Wallace. “Those broke down today.”

Plaintiff Paul McKim

The lawsuit alleges that Kazeminy steered $75,000 through a Texas firm he controls to Coleman through a job his wife, Laurie Coleman, held with a Minnesota insurance firm. If Coleman received such a gift and failed to report it, the repercussions could extend beyond his reelection prospects. Earlier this week, Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens was convicted of seven felony counts after failing to report gifts from friends on federal disclosure forms.

Coleman campaign manager Cullen Sheehan has denied the allegation, calling it “baseless,” and claiming that the lawsuit is politically motivated.

Wallace denies this assertion. “It was absolutely, positively not done for political purposes,” he says. “It has nothing to do with the election.”

Previous MnIndy coverage:

Video: Sen. Norm Coleman flees reporters asking about pal Kazeminy’s Texas lawsuit
Latest Coleman & Kazeminy connection: The Star Tribune needs to tell the story
Coleman and Kazeminy redux: Here’s the legal complaint in McKim v. Kazeminy et al

Norm and Laurie: A second Coleman-Kazeminy connection implicates Mrs. C.

The figure of Nasser Kazeminy — longtime Norm Coleman friend and patron — is once again casting a shadow over the U.S. Senate campaign. Kazeminy, the man who may or may not have purchased suits for Coleman at Neiman-Marcus once upon a time, was reportedly accused in a lawsuit filed (and withdrawn) this week of funneling money to Coleman’s wife, Laurie Coleman, through a third party.

(UPDATE: The Nation has obtained a copy of the suit. Someone sent one to MnIndy as well; it’s posted here.)

We know this because there is videotape (published this morning at MnIndy) of Star Tribune reporter Paul McEnroe asking Coleman — or rather, the closed window of Coleman’s SUV — about it.

But whereas McEnroe and Tony Kennedy’s previous inquiries into the Coleman/Kazeminy relationship (the Neiman-Marcus affair) never yielded a story in the paper, this one has to. A quick recapitulation of the main known facts in the matter explains why.

1) The lawsuit was filed Tuesday Monday in a Texas court. Kazeminy was the defendant; the plaintiff is not publicly known at present.

2) One of the claims in the lawsuit, judging from McEnroe’s questions on the video, is the allegation that Laurie Coleman received $75,000 indirectly from Kazeminy, disbursed by Deep Marine Technologies, a company of which Kazeminy owns a substantial share, and paid to Hays Companies, an insurance/risk management outfit where Laurie Coleman was on the payroll.

3) The lawsuit was withdrawn on Wednesday. In his comments to the Pioneer Press, Coleman said the claim was “’simply false.’… The purpose of this stuff is to, at the 11th hour, throw something out there and see if it sticks. There were some things that we believe were thrown in there for the purpose of influencing the campaign. It was withdrawn because the attorneys recognized that there were some things in there that weren’t factual.” Coleman claims, in other words, that the suit was withdrawn because it lacked merit — because the allegations contained in it were false.

4) When asked directly about the disposition of the lawsuit — specifically, whether Kazeminy had struck a settlement with the plaintiff — Coleman campaign manager Cullen Sheehan said he didn’t know: “I don’t know about the details of a settlement or not.”

So either the plaintiff was leaned on to withdraw a legal action without merit, or the defendant made a settlement with that party within 24 hours or so of the litigation’s filing. Which was it? The implications regarding the merits of the underlying claim would be judged very differently by most legal observers depending on the answer.

5) The Star Tribune’s McEnroe and Kennedy — unlike any other reporters in town, to our knowledge — have a copy of the lawsuit, which MnIndy and no doubt others are pursuing through the county court systems of Texas. McEnroe and Kennedy are thus in a position to contact the principals’ attorneys of record to get an answer about the disposition of the suit, and to elaborate on the nature of the claims in it, with whatever caveats and disclaimers their reporting of the story may dictate.

But under no circumstances should the public be left in the dark concerning the backstory that frames this unusual turn of events. If the Strib stays mum this time, it will only get tougher for them to deny the not-exactly-subtle pro-GOP bias on the part of the paper’s editors.

We’re working to confirm or disconfirm the buzz. More details as we hear them.

UPDATE, 2 pm: Paul Schmelzer, who had gone over to videotape the scheduled 2 o’clock presser, just phoned to say that it’s been postponed until 11 a.m. tomorrow.

Update, 3 pm: MNPublius offers research on three instances in which complaints or suits have been filed on Coleman’s behalf late in the campaign, once in 1998 and twice in 2002.

Also this morning: ACORN filed a lawsuit in New Mexico alleging that GOP officials there are engaged in a voter-intimidation campaign.