Politics

ST. PAUL (AP) ― Sen. Norm Coleman missed a historic opportunity as chairman of a U.S. Senate investigatory committee to expose waste, fraud and abuse by defense contractors during the reconstruction of Iraq, his Democratic opponent Al Franken said Monday.

Franken is targeting Coleman's tenure as chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in a statewide tour and with a new TV ad that will air around Minnesota starting Tuesday. The Franken campaign said that Coleman's leadership of the committee is the single strongest argument against him deserving a second term.

A spokesman for the Coleman campaign defended Coleman's leadership of the subcommittee and said he has supported investigations of U.S. spending on Iraqi reconstruction by other entities. Under Coleman's leadership, the subcommittee uncovered billions of dollars in unpaid taxes by defense contractors and other federal government contractors, abuse of travel privileges by federal officials and tax cheating by Medicare and Medicaid providers.

But Franken said Coleman was in a unique position to catch and punish defense contractors who schemed to overcharge the government for services linked to the rebuilding of Iraq. Franken pointed to Harry S. Truman's work as a U.S. senator in the early 1940s to root out fraud in defense contracting as the U.S. entered into World War II.

Truman's work ultimately spawned the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which Coleman took leadership of in 2003 as a freshman. It's the only post in the U.S. Senate that gives its holder sole power to issue subpoenas.

Speaking of instances of fraud by Halliburton and other companies during the early days of the Iraqi reconstruction, Franken said: "If Harry Truman had been chairing the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 2003, this would not have happened ... He would have put a stop to the corruption and saved taxpayers billions of dollars by preventing fraud before it happened."

At the time, Democrats were in the minority in Congress and were mostly relegated to demanding that Republicans open investigations into abuse of tax dollars in the Iraqi reconstruction. The Franken campaign provided a letter that former Minnesota Sen. Mark Dayton sent to Coleman asking for an investigation into an allegation of fraud by Halliburton.

In a letter back to Dayton, Coleman noted that he directed a "preliminary investigation" into Dayton's concerns and said he would continue to monitor the issue. The subcommittee never initiated its own full investigation.

Coleman's spokesman, Luke Friedrich, said Coleman believed there were better entities than the subcommittee to look into the Iraqi reconstruction.

"Al Franken would blame Norm Coleman for anything if it was going to get him political points," Friedrich said. "On this one, he's attempting to say everything that went wrong in Iraq was Norm Coleman's fault. It's not true."

Friedrich cited Coleman's support of the efforts by the Office of the Special Investigator for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR); Coleman was a co-sponsor of legislation to extend the office past the end of 2006.

SIGIR was established toward the end of 2004, and Franken argued that the best time to investigate fraud in Iraq would have been in 2003 and 2004, when the reconstruction was beginning. Returning to the Truman comparison, he pointed out that Truman looked into abuse by defense contractors just as the U.S. was getting into World War II.

The Coleman campaign also cited the subcommittee's relatively small staff, suggesting it lacked the resources to tackle the full breadth of fraud linked to reconstruction. They noted a quote by U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, who during Coleman's chairmanship was the subcommittee's ranking Democrat and who now its chairman. Levin said last year that even the much larger Senate Armed Services Committee lacked the number of staffers needed to investigate all the financial malfeasance that took place in Iraq contracting.

Also Monday, the Coleman campaign introduced a group of "Veterans for Coleman" who touted his work on various issues important to military veterans. Franken has spoken of the importance of higher government spending on programs for veterans.

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