U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman's lack of oversight during the four years he led the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations cost taxpayers $15 billion due to waste, fraud and no-bid contracts meant to Iraq, challenger Al Franken charged today.
Franken also said that Coleman received $100,000 from Halliburton and other defense contractors.
"He should have been a watchdog, instead he was a lapdog for Bush and his cronies," Franken said today during a cam-paign stop in Duluth. He also made stops in St. Paul and Rochester.
Accompanying Franken was Daryl Bong of Wrenshall, who served with the Army in Afghanistan from 2004-05.While there, he said, he saw construction equipment, construction materials and other supplies that had been thrown away or lost.
"People should be outraged about all this stuff, and I can't believe Norm Coleman let them get away with it," he said.
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Coleman's campaign rejected Franken's claims as partisan attacks.
"Norm Coleman has been a champion of oversight during his time in the Senate," said Luke Friedrich, spokesman for Coleman's campaign. "Norm is one of the senators who led efforts to ensure that oversight was being done" through crea-tion of the office of the Special Investigator General for Iraq Reconstruction.
Congress created the office of Special Investigator General for Iraq Reconstruction in October 2004.
But the creation of the office didn't free Coleman from his responsibility to investigate allegations of fraud, waste and profiteering by defense contractors, Franken said.
"He stood idly by while their greed ran rampant," Franken said.
Friedrich acknowledged that Coleman received donations from defense contractors, but said "Al Franken has gotten money from the defense industry himself in this election cycle. You can question whether or not he is being a hypocrite."
Coleman chaired the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations from 2003 to 2007, and remains the highest-ranking Republican on the 11-member body. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich, is now chairman. Like Coleman, Levin hasn't held any investigations of Iraq reconstruction, Friedrich said.
According to the subcommittee's Web site, issues the body has recently investigated have included Medicaid and Medi-care fraud, the abuse of government credit cards, tax shelters and offshore tax havens, and speculation in the natural gas and oil markets.
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According to Coleman's campaign office, the subcommittee has uncovered more than $70 billion in government waste, fraud and abuse in America over the past several years.
