INDIANAPOLIS — Democratic Party officials on Tuesday accused Republican Senate candidate Dan Coats of lying during a debate when he said he didn't begin negotiating a job at a Washington lobbying firm until after leaving the Senate in 1999.
During a sometimes snippy debate Monday between Coats, Democratic Rep. Brad Ellsworth and Libertarian Rebecca Sink-Burris, Ellsworth accused Coats of negotiating his deal to join the law and lobbying firm Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson and Hand in 1998, when he was still a senator.
Coats replied that former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole at the firm both contacted him and said they wanted to talk to him when he left the Senate.
"A number of people said that," Coats went on to say. "I said, ‘Under the laws, I'm not able to negotiate anything, nor do I want to negotiate anything. In fact I took a month off after I left because I didn't even want to think about what was next. It was then that they approached me to join them as special counsel. It was a privilege to be asked to join two former majority leaders, one a Democrat and one a Republican, at a very respected law firm."
But Coats was still in the Senate when his office announced in December 1998 that he planned on joining the firm after he left the Senate in January 1999.
The Coats campaign said the accusations by the state Democratic Party were overblown and that Coats simply misspoke during Monday's debate.
But Indiana Democratic Party Chairman Dan Parker called Coats' assertion a "bald-faced lie."
"Are Hoosiers going to allow him to lie his way out of this?" Parker asked.
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Parker stopped short of saying Coats violated any ethics rules. He said the "laws" Coats alluded to in his debate response were not in place when Coats was in the Senate. Coats may not have broken any rules, Parker said, but did lie "because he knows that his position as a lobbyist and the fact that he took advantage of the revolving door in Washington is a vulnerability to his campaign."
"It's unacceptable, and Hoosiers cannot tolerate this in a U.S. Senate candidate," Parker said.
Coats adviser Kevin Kellems said voters would understand.
"Hoosiers don't require slickness of their politicians, and in the heat of a live debate Indiana voters understand when something isn't communicated as clearly as it could have been," he said.
Democrats have spent much of the campaign portraying Coats as beholden to Washington special interests, while Republicans have worked to portray Ellsworth as a rubber stamp for a liberal Democratic agenda in Washington.
A recent poll suggested Coats had a comfortable lead.
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