ticklethewire.com
If you’re going to hire someone to help in a federal criminal matter, it can’t hurt to get an attorney who use to head up the FBI.
Former FBI Director Louis Freeh was hired by Minnesota businessman Nasser Kazeminy, who was under investigation for allegations that he gave Sen. Norm Coleman illegal campaign contributions, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported. Freeh conducted an independent investigation of the allegations.
On Tuesday, attorneys for Kazeminy announced that the Justice Department had decided not to file criminal charges against either one, the paper reported.
The paper reported that late in Coleman’s failed campaign bid for re-election allegations surfaced that Kazeminy tried to funnel $75,000 to the family of former Sen. Norm Coleman through a Minneapolis insurance company that employed Coleman’s wife, Laurie.
Robert Weinstine, one of Kazeminy’s attorneys, said the allegations had “no credibility,” account to the Star Tribune.
The paper reported that Freeh, who was hired by Kazeminy to investigate the allegations against him, said that although “these allegations were entirely false, they were repeated in hundreds of local and national media reports” that left the reputations of the two men “injured and tarnished.”
Coleman, who lost to comedian Al Franken, issued a statement saying the Justice Department’s decision “is welcomed but not a surprise” and that his “political opponents turned those lies into multimillion-dollar attacks against my family and Nasser Kazeminy.”
The paper reported that Freeh reviewed the facts in the case.
Ron Rosenbaum, a Minneapolis attorney serving as a spokesman for Kazeminy, said Freeh reviewed the previous investigation of the allegations along with numerous documents, according to the paper.
“He went over everything,” Ron Rosenbaum, a spokesman for Kazeminy said. “In criminal defense work, you don’t rely on your client’s word. Kazeminy wanted this investigated from top to bottom because he wanted a clean bill of health.”
The paper reported that On Tuesday, Freeh said that “we found that there were gifts that were made.” He said that Coleman and Kazeminy “have a long-term, personal relationship that goes back to when he was mayor. … We looked at the gifts and we found no wrongdoing and no impropriety with respect to that exchange.”
Oh, please. Just a gift, eh? Between old friends, eh? How come it had to be funneled through relatives of the “gift” giver? Money laundering, plain and simple.